Senior Engineer, Bioinformatics

Details

Anthropic's Life Sciences team is seeking a senior software engineer to build reliable biology software for internal scientists and the wider computational biology community. The role focuses on genomics and structural biology and involves turning research code into validated, documented, versioned, packaged, and maintained public software that researchers can install and trust.

The engineer will write substantial code, own release quality, maintain public repositories, engage with computational biologists, and use Claude and AI coding agents across design, implementation, testing, and review. The role may be primarily individual-contributor focused or may involve leading a small group while continuing to contribute directly.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain biology software in genomics and structural biology, including libraries, command-line tools, pipelines, datasets, and benchmarks.
• Own the process from research code to public release, including testing, validation against reference data and established tools, benchmarking, documentation, packaging, and versioning.
• Triage issues, review external contributions, and manage breaking changes in released software.
• Represent the team through conferences, workshops, tutorials, and direct collaboration with researchers and maintainers.
• Work with computational and experimental scientists to turn research code into tested, reusable software.
• Lead technical direction through design reviews, code reviews, and mentoring, and potentially lead a small team.
• Use Claude and AI coding agents as a standard part of development, while verifying the correctness and performance of agent-written code.

Requirements

• Experience building, releasing, and maintaining biology software used by researchers outside one's own group, with evidence such as public repositories, package downloads, citations, or adoption in other groups' pipelines.
• Deep working expertise in genomics or structural biology, including relevant data types, file formats, standard tools, and common failure modes.
• Proficiency in Python and comfort working with large datasets in Linux and cloud or cluster computing environments.
• Experience with rigorous testing and release engineering, including unit and integration tests, continuous integration, reference-data validation, packaging, and versioning.
• Experience using AI coding tools centrally in software development and verifying the correctness and performance of code not written by hand.
• Experience leading technical projects with multiple contributors while continuing to write code.
• Ability to explain technical work clearly to biologists and engineers through documentation, tutorials, talks, and workshops.

Preferred Qualifications

• Expertise in both genomics and structural biology.
• Experience creating or maintaining a widely used open-source computational biology tool.
• Experience managing or formally leading engineers or scientists.
• A graduate degree in computational biology, bioinformatics, computer science, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Proficiency in Rust, C++, C, or another systems language, with experience optimizing performance on large biological datasets.
• Experience in phylogenetics, proteomics, cheminformatics, high-throughput screen analysis, or other computational biology areas.
• Experience shipping software built largely with AI coding agents, building agentic systems on large language models, or training machine learning models on biological sequence or structure data.

Logistics and Benefits

• Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience.
• Required field of study: A relevant field demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.
• Staff are currently expected to work from an Anthropic office at least 25% of the time, although some roles may require more office time.
• Anthropic offers competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and office collaboration space.