Technical Program Manager, Discovery

Details

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The Discovery team focuses on building an AI scientist — training large-scale models, running complex multi-week experiments, and building products at the intersection of AI and science. The team works on long-horizon reasoning challenges and trains models across scientific domains including life sciences and STEM.

Responsibilities

• Own systems and programs that determine research velocity: compute planning, scientific RL environment health, and vendor pipelines that supply them.
• Manage Discovery's compute planning across supervised learning (SL), reinforcement learning (RL), and sandboxing workloads, including forecasting, allocation, prioritization, and efficiency improvements. Partner with central compute planning to ensure Discovery's needs are represented and met.
• Monitor the health of scientific RL environments (quality, reward integrity, failure rates) and drive issues to resolution.
• Expedite the external vendor pipeline for RL environments, including quality review, reward design, and production integration.
• Work with research teams across life sciences, STEM, and other scientific domains to translate research goals into roadmaps that advance AI scientist capabilities.
• Establish processes and frameworks that bring structure to an unstructured research setting without slowing researchers down.
• Collaborate with research leads, infrastructure engineers, and data operations to identify blockers, prioritize competing needs, and make technical trade-off decisions.

Requirements

• Background in ML engineering, ML research, or STEM R&D before transitioning to technical program management.
• Deep, hands-on experience with ML training pipelines, RLHF systems, and large-scale data infrastructure in production.
• Ability to debug data pipelines, read RL transcripts to spot issues, and make allocation and quality decisions in real time when experimental or production runs hit problems.
• Track record of building execution plans and inventing high-leverage processes that reduce operational overhead and let researchers focus on research.
• Strong organizational effectiveness: navigate a fast-growing organization and coordinate across research, infrastructure, product, and data operations without losing velocity.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills; ability to influence senior technical staff and drive delivery.
• Fast learner who can build deep contextual understanding in unfamiliar technical domains and contribute meaningfully to discussions with researchers.

Logistics

• Location: San Francisco, CA and New York City, NY (United States).
• Location-based hybrid policy: staff are expected to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time.
• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience. Required field of study: a field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.
• Minimum years of experience: will correlate with internal job level requirements for the position.
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic states they do sponsor visas and retain an immigration lawyer to help, though sponsorship is not guaranteed for every role/candidate.

Compensation and Benefits

• Annual salary range: $365,000 - $435,000 USD.
• Anthropic offers competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and office space for collaboration.

Why Anthropic / Additional Context

• Anthropic emphasizes large-scale, high-impact AI research and collaboration across teams. The role sits at the intersection of research, infrastructure, and operations and focuses on accelerating scientific discovery using AI.