Research Engineer, Life Sciences

Details

About Anthropic

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

Role overview

We're seeking an exceptional Research Engineer to join our Life Sciences team at Anthropic. Our team is organized around the north star goal of accelerating progress in the life sciences, from early discovery through translation, by an order of magnitude. Our team likes to think across the whole model stack. In this role, you'll combine your deep expertise in machine learning engineering to develop novel evaluation frameworks and training strategies that push the frontier of what AI can achieve in biology.

You'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and the biological sciences, developing rigorous methods to measure and improve model performance on complex scientific tasks. You'll collaborate closely with world-class researchers and engineers to build AI systems that can engage in all phases of research and development, while maintaining our commitment to safety and beneficial impact.

Previous experience in life sciences is welcome, but not required for this role.

Responsibilities

• Develop novel evaluation frameworks and training strategies for models applied to life sciences and biology-related problems
• Design and implement methods to measure and improve model performance on complex scientific tasks
• Build and operate ML systems and data pipelines at scale for large datasets
• Collaborate closely with researchers and engineers across model development, evaluation, and deployment
• Work across the whole model stack to push forward AI capabilities in scientific contexts

Minimum Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience training and evaluating large language models
• Proficiency in Python and familiarity with modern ML development practices
• Experience building and managing data pipelines for large-scale datasets
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and developing solutions in rapidly evolving research environments
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work independently while collaborating effectively across cross-functional teams

Preferred Qualifications

• 8+ years of machine learning experience
• Prior work experience in AI and biology, including graduate studies (molecular biology, biochemistry, computational biology, or related fields)
• Experience working with large-scale biological datasets
• Published research or practical experience in scientific AI applications or long-horizon reasoning
• Background in reinforcement learning and/or pretraining
• Knowledge of containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and cloud deployment at scale
• Demonstrated ability to work across multiple domains, such as language modeling, systems engineering, and scientific computing
• Contributions to open-source scientific software or databases

Compensation

Annual Salary: $350,000 - $500,000 USD

Logistics

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
• Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
• Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.
• Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas. If an offer is made, Anthropic will make reasonable efforts to assist with a visa and retains an immigration lawyer to help.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

Benefits

Anthropic offers competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues.