Senior+ Software Engineer, Research Tools

Details

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The Research Tools team builds infrastructure and applications that enable researchers to iterate quickly, run complex experiments, and extract insights from frontier AI systems. This role sits at the intersection of product thinking and full-stack engineering and works directly with researchers and engineers to identify bottlenecks and ship solutions that multiply their productivity.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain full-stack applications and infrastructure used daily by researchers to conduct experiments, collect feedback, and analyze results
• Partner closely with research teams to understand workflows, pain points, and requirements, and translate these into technical solutions
• Design intuitive interfaces and abstractions for complex research tasks
• Create reusable platforms and tools that accelerate development of new research applications
• Rapidly prototype and iterate on solutions, gather feedback from users, and refine based on real-world usage
• Take ownership of complete product areas from understanding user needs through design, implementation, and ongoing iteration
• Contribute to technical strategy and architectural decisions for research tooling
• Mentor other engineers and help establish best practices for research application development

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with a strong focus on full-stack development
• Proven ability to rapidly iterate and ship working prototypes
• Experience building tools, platforms, or infrastructure for technical users (engineers, researchers, data scientists, analysts, etc.)
• High agency and ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments
• Strong product instincts and ability to identify the right problems to solve
• Proficiency with modern web technologies (explicitly mentions React, TypeScript, Python)
• Track record of building user-facing applications that are used and loved by their target audience
• Effective communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent experience (required)

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience building research tools, scientific software, or experimentation platforms
• Background in machine learning, AI research, or working closely with ML researchers
• Experience founding or early engineering at startups, especially developer or researcher tools
• Built open-source tools or platforms with active user communities
• Experience with data visualization, interactive interfaces, or novel interaction paradigms
• Contributed to engineering platforms or internal tooling at scale (examples referenced: Heroku, Vercel)
• Experience leveraging AI/LLMs to build tools
• Domain knowledge in human-computer interaction, systems safety, or AI alignment

Representative projects

• Building interfaces for collecting and managing human feedback on model outputs at scale
• Creating experiment orchestration platforms to launch, monitor, and analyze complex research runs
• Developing visualization tools to help researchers understand model behavior and identify failure modes
• Designing reusable components and frameworks for rapid development of research applications
• Building sandboxed execution environments for safely running AI-generated code

Compensation & Logistics

• Annual base salary: $300,000 - $405,000 USD
• Total compensation package includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation
• Education requirement: at least a Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent experience
• Location-based hybrid policy: staff are expected to be in one of Anthropic's offices at least 25% of the time (role listed in San Francisco and New York City)
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic does sponsor visas and retains an immigration lawyer, though sponsorship is not guaranteed for every role or candidate

Why Anthropic / Culture

Anthropic emphasizes large-scale, collaborative AI research focused on creating steerable, trustworthy systems. The company values impact, communication skills, and diverse perspectives. Applicants are encouraged to apply even if they do not meet every listed qualification.

How to apply

Application fields include contact details, resume or LinkedIn profile, relocation openness, visa sponsorship requirements, and answers about AI usage in the application process. Anthropic provides guidance on candidates' AI usage during the application process via their policy link.