Staff Research Engineer, Discovery Team

Details

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

Role overview

You will work end-to-end to identify and remove key blockers on the path to scientific AGI. The team focuses on improving models' abilities to use computers as a laboratory for long-horizon tasks and scientific workflows. Strong candidates should be familiar with language model training, evaluation, and inference, be comfortable triaging research ideas and diagnosing problems, and enjoy working collaboratively. Familiarity with performance optimization, distributed systems, VM/sandboxing/container deployment, and large-scale data pipelines is highly encouraged.

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 ML research experience
• Familiarity with large-scale language model training, evaluation, and inference pipelines
• Ability to triage research ideas, diagnose problems, and translate research concepts into scalable engineering solutions
• Expertise in performance optimization and distributed computing systems
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to identify technical bottlenecks in complex systems
• Track record of shipping ML systems that tackle challenging multi-step reasoning problems

Strong candidates may also have (preferred / nice-to-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
• Demonstrated ability to work across multiple domains (language modeling, systems engineering, scientific computing)
• Published research or practical experience in scientific AI applications or long-horizon reasoning

Compensation & Benefits

• Annual base salary: $340,000 - $425,000 USD
• Total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation
• Competitive benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and office space

Logistics

• Location: San Francisco, CA
• Education requirements: At least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience
• Location-based hybrid policy: staff expected to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic does sponsor visas in many cases and retains an immigration lawyer to assist

How we're different

Anthropic works as a cohesive team on a few large-scale research efforts, valuing high-impact research, collaboration, and communication. The team views AI research as an empirical science with connections to fields like physics and biology and encourages reading recent research directions such as GPT-3, circuit-based interpretability, scaling laws, and learning from human preferences.

Application notes

• Applicants are encouraged to apply even if they do not meet every qualification listed
• Guidance on candidates' AI usage and application policies are provided by Anthropic