Research Engineer / Scientist, Tool Use

Details

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The Tool Use team within Research is focused on making Claude the world's most capable, reliable, safe, and efficient model for tool use and agentic applications. The team works on core problems such as tool call accuracy, long-horizon & complex tool-use workflows, large-scale & dynamic tools, tool hallucination, tool-use safety (e.g., prompt injection robustness), and tool-use efficiency. Team work spans research, product, and production to deliver capabilities like coding (Claude Code), search, memory, and multi-agent systems.

Responsibilities

• Define and pursue research agendas that push the boundaries of tool use and agentic AI.
• Design and implement novel reinforcement learning environments and methodologies targeting state-of-the-art tool use.
• Build rigorous, realistic evaluations that capture the complexity of real-world tool use.
• Ship research advances that directly impact millions of users by working across research and product teams.
• Collaborate with other frontier research and product teams to drive fundamental breakthroughs in capabilities and safety, and help ship them into production.
• Design, implement, and debug code across research and production ML stacks.
• Contribute to a collaborative research culture through pair programming, technical discussions, and team problem-solving.

Requirements

• At least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.
• Strong machine learning research or applied-research experience, or a strong quantitative background (e.g., physics, mathematics, quant research).
• Solid software engineering skills; ability to write clean, reliable code.
• Ability to communicate complex ideas clearly to diverse audiences.
• Passion for building AI systems that are both powerful and safe.
• Willingness and hunger to learn and grow, regardless of years of experience.

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience with reinforcement learning techniques and environments.
• Experience with language model training, fine-tuning, or evaluation.
• Experience building AI agents or autonomous systems.
• Published influential work in relevant ML areas.
• Deep expertise in a specific area (e.g., exceptional RL research, systems engineering, or mathematical foundations).
• Experience shipping features or working closely with product teams.
• Enthusiasm for pair programming and collaborative research.

Logistics

• Locations: San Francisco, CA; New York City, NY; Seattle, WA.
• Location-based hybrid policy: staff are expected to be in one of the offices at least 25% of the time (some roles may require more time on-site).
• Education: at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience required.
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic does sponsor visas; they will make reasonable efforts and retain an immigration lawyer, though sponsorship is not guaranteed for every role/candidate.

Compensation

• Annual salary range: $340,000 - $425,000 USD.

Why join

Anthropic emphasizes large-scale, high-impact AI research and collaborative work across a single cohesive research organization. The company values impact, communication skills, and diverse perspectives, and offers competitive compensation, benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and office spaces for collaboration.