Research Engineer, Search

Details

We are looking for Research Engineers to help us redesign how Claude interacts with external data sources. Many of the paradigms for how data and knowledge bases are organized assume human consumers and constraints. This is no longer true in a world of LLMs. Your job will be to design new architectures for how information is organized, and train language models to optimally use those architectures.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement from scratch new information architecture strategies.
• Perform fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to teach language models how to interact with new information architectures.
• Build “hard” knowledge base evaluation sets to help identify failure modes of how language models work with external data.
• Design and evaluate advanced agentic search capabilities.

Requirements

• Very experienced Python programmer who can quickly produce reliable, high-quality code.
• Good machine learning research experience.
• Experience developing software that utilizes Large Language Models (such as Claude).
• Results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact.
• Willingness to pick up slack even if it goes outside your job description.
• Enjoy pair programming and collaborating closely with teammates.
• Able to partner with world-class ML researchers to develop new LLM capabilities.
• Care about the societal impacts of your work and have clear written and verbal communication skills.
• Education: At least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

Strong candidates will also have experience with

• Collaborating with product teams to quickly prototype and deliver innovative solutions.
• Building complex agentic systems that utilize LLMs.
• Developing scalable distributed information retrieval systems, such as search engines, knowledge graphs, RAG, indexing, ranking, query understanding, and distributed data processing.

Compensation

• Annual Salary: £250,000 - £270,000 GBP

Logistics & Other Info

• Location: London, UK. Location-based hybrid policy: staff are expected to be in an office at least 25% of the time (some roles may require more time onsite).
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic states they do sponsor visas and will make reasonable efforts and retain immigration counsel when an offer is made, though sponsorship is not guaranteed for every role or candidate.
• Encouragement to apply even if you do not meet every qualification; Anthropic emphasizes diversity and inclusive hiring.

How we're different / Benefits

• Anthropic focuses on large-scale, high-impact AI research and works as a cohesive team on a few large research efforts.
• They value communication, collaboration, and empirical research approaches to AI.
• Company is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. They offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and collaborative office space.

Notes

• The role centers on research-engineering work at the intersection of ML research, LLMs, information retrieval, and agentic search capabilities.