Research Engineer, Societal Impacts

Details

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems that are safe and beneficial for people and society. The Societal Impacts team studies how Anthropic’s AI systems affect the economy, people’s wellbeing, education, and broader socio-technical alignment. The team develops privacy-preserving tools, mixed-methods studies of human-AI interaction, and translates research insights into product and policy recommendations.

Note: We are only open to hiring in San Francisco for this team.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable technical infrastructure that enables researchers to efficiently run experiments and evaluate AI systems.
• Architect systems that can handle uncertain and changing requirements while maintaining high standards of reliability.
• Lead technical design discussions to ensure infrastructure supports current needs and future research directions.
• Partner closely with researchers, data scientists, policy experts, and other cross-functional partners to advance Anthropic’s safety mission.
• Interface with and improve internal technical infrastructure and tools; build production-grade internal tools or research infrastructure.
• Generate net-new insights about the potential societal impacts of systems being developed by Anthropic.

Requirements

• Experience running and designing experiments relating to machine learning systems and using technical infrastructure to interface with ML models.
• Experience building and maintaining production-grade internal tools or research infrastructure.
• Strong software engineering skills; take pride in writing clean, well-documented code in Python that others can build upon.
• Experience building data processing pipelines and deriving insights from imperfect data streams.
• Comfortable making technical decisions with incomplete information and getting up to speed quickly on unfamiliar codebases.
• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent experience (required).

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience maintaining large, foundational infrastructure and distributed systems, designed for scale and reliability.
• Experience building simple interfaces that allow non-technical collaborators to evaluate AI systems and prioritizing requests from diverse stakeholders.
• Experience scaling and optimizing the performance of tools, and building robust monitoring systems to detect or understand misuse or unexpected behaviors.

Representative projects

• Design and implement scalable infrastructure for running large-scale experiments on human-AI interaction (examples: Clio, the Economic Index, Values in the Wild, Emotional Impacts).
• Build robust monitoring systems to help detect and understand potential misuse or unexpected behaviors.
• Create internal tools that help researchers, policy experts, and product teams quickly analyze dynamically changing AI system characteristics.

Logistics

• Location: San Francisco, CA (must be in San Francisco for this team).
• Location-based hybrid policy: currently expect staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time.
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic does sponsor visas and retains immigration counsel, though not every role/candidate can be successfully sponsored.
• Education requirements: At least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

Benefits & culture

• Competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, lovely office space, and emphasis on collaborative, high-impact AI research.
• Encouragement to apply even if you do not meet every listed qualification; Anthropic values diverse perspectives and communication skills.