[Expression of Interest] Research Engineer / Scientist, Alignment - London

Menlo Ventures; Greater London; On-site; GBP 260,000 - 370,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Equity donation matching

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a Research Engineer on Alignment Science to run machine learning experiments aimed at understanding AI behavior. This role involves significant collaboration with teams focused on AI safety and requires candidates to be in London at least 25% of the time.

The ideal candidate possesses a Bachelor's degree and has a strong background in software engineering and machine learning. We offer a competitive salary and flexible working arrangements, with opportunities for growth in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Significant software, ML, or research engineering experience.
• Experience contributing to empirical AI research projects.
• Familiarity with technical AI safety research.

Responsibilities

• Build and run machine learning experiments to steer AI behavior.
• Collaborate on exploratory research on AI safety.
• Contribute to research papers and blog posts.

Skills

Software engineering

Machine learning

AI safety research

Collaborative projects

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Python

Kubernetes

Job description

About Anthropic

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.

About the role

You want to build and run elegant and thorough machine learning experiments to help us understand and steer the behavior of powerful AI systems. You care about making AI helpful, honest, and harmless, and are interested in the ways that this could be challenging in the context of human‑level capabilities. You could describe yourself as both a scientist and an engineer. As a Research Engineer on Alignment Science, you’ll contribute to exploratory experimental research on AI safety, with a focus on risks from powerful future systems, often in collaboration with other teams including Interpretability, Fine‑Tuning, and the Frontier Red Team.

Research areas

• AI Control – Creating methods to ensure advanced AI systems remain safe and harmless in unfamiliar or adversarial scenarios.
• Alignment Stress‑testing – Creating model organisms of misalignment to improve our empirical understanding of how alignment failures might arise.

Note: Currently, the team's hub is in San Francisco, so we require all candidates to be based at least 25% in London and travel to San Francisco occasionally. Additionally, we are prioritizing growing our San Francisco teams, so you may not hear back on your application to the London team unless we see an unusually strong fit. For this role, we conduct all interviews in Python.

Representative Projects

• Testing the robustness of our safety techniques by training language models to subvert our safety techniques, and seeing how effective they are at subverting our interventions.
• Run multi‑agent reinforcement learning experiments to test out techniques like AI Debate.
• Build tooling to efficiently evaluate the effectiveness of novel LLM‑generated jailbreaks.
• Write scripts and prompts to efficiently produce evaluation questions to test models’ reasoning abilities in safety‑relevant contexts.
• Contribute ideas, figures, and writing to research papers, blog posts, and talks.
• Run experiments that feed into key AI safety efforts at Anthropic, such as the design and implementation of our Responsible Scaling Policy.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have significant software, ML, or research engineering experience
• Have some experience contributing to empirical AI research projects
• Have some familiarity with technical AI safety research
• Prefer fast‑moving collaborative projects to extensive solo efforts
• Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
• Care about the impacts of AI

Strong candidates may also:

• Have experience authoring research papers in machine learning, NLP, or AI safety
• Have experience with LLMs
• Have experience with reinforcement learning
• Have experience with Kubernetes clusters and complex shared codebases

Candidates need not have:

• 100% of the skills needed to perform the job
• Formal certifications or education credentials

Annual Salary

£260,000 — £370,000 GBP

Logistics

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an 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: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
• Location‑based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.
• Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas. However, we aren’t able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. If we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

Benefits

We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues.

Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage

Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.