Staff Research Engineer, Discovery Team

Details

Anthropic’s Discovery Team is focused on building systems to advance long-horizon reasoning and scientific workflows. The team works across the whole model stack, with a current focus on improving models' abilities to use computers as a laboratory for long-horizon tasks and scientific discovery. This role involves end-to-end research engineering: identifying bottlenecks, scaling research prototypes to production, building evaluation frameworks, and implementing distributed training and inference systems.

Responsibilities

• Work across the full stack to identify and remove bottlenecks preventing progress toward scientific AGI
• Develop approaches to address long-horizon task completion and complex reasoning challenges essential for scientific discovery
• Scale research ideas from prototype to production
• Create benchmarks and evaluation frameworks to measure model capabilities in scientific workflows and computer use
• Implement distributed training systems and performance optimizations to support large-scale model development

Requirements

• 8+ years of machine learning research experience
• Familiarity with large-scale language model training, evaluation, and inference pipelines
• Experience triaging research ideas, diagnosing problems, and iterating on immediate technical blockers
• Expertise in performance optimization and distributed computing systems
• Ability to translate research concepts into scalable engineering solutions and ship ML systems for multi-step reasoning problems
• Strong problem-solving skills and experience identifying technical bottlenecks in complex systems

Strong candidates may also have

• Expertise with performance optimization for language model inference and training
• Experience with computer use automation and agentic AI systems
• Experience with reinforcement learning approaches for complex task completion
• Knowledge of containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) and cloud deployment at scale
• Experience with VM/sandboxing/container deployment and large-scale data processing
• Experience working across language modeling, systems engineering, and scientific computing
• Published research or practical experience in scientific AI applications or long-horizon reasoning

Logistics

• Annual salary range: $340,000 - $425,000 USD
• Education: 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 the offices at least 25% of the time (some roles may require more office time)
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic does sponsor visas and retains an immigration lawyer, though sponsorship is not guaranteed for every role

Benefits & Culture

• Competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and an office space in San Francisco
• Collaborative research environment with frequent research discussions and emphasis on high-impact, large-scale AI research
• Encouragement to apply even if candidates do not meet every qualification