Anthropic STEM Fellow

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 100,000 - 167,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Equity donation matching

In-person orientation in San Francisco

Job summary

Anthropic invites researchers and engineers to join the STEM Fellows program in San Francisco for a four-month fellowship focused on frontier problems where Claude can be advanced with domain expertise. You will work in small pods, pairing domain knowledge with Claude and internal tooling to define open problems, build datasets, and evaluate models.

Prior ML experience is helpful but not required; a PhD in a STEM field and several years of experience are preferred.

Qualifications

• PhD in a STEM field and several years of experience preferred.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent required for Logistics.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, high‑agency environment.
• Authorization to work in the United States for the program duration.

Responsibilities

• Set grand challenges for your field and define long-horizon open problems where Claude falls short.
• Build datasets, simulations, and evaluations to test Claude on mechanisms and reasoning.
• Apply Claude to open problems using test-time compute strategies and internal tools.
• Collaborate with Anthropic researchers in small pods to share methods and refine approaches.
• Demonstrate hands-on experience with Claude and Claude Code in daily workflows.
• Hold a PhD in STEM and have several years of relevant experience (e.g., post‑doc or faculty).
• Ensure you can participate in the program in the United States for the duration.

Skills

Collaborative research

Domain expertise

Education

PhD in STEM

Bachelor's degree

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.

Program Overview

Some of our world's grand challenges, from resolving long-open problems in mathematics to designing medicines for neglected diseases, require deep expert judgment that today's AI still lacks. We're working toward an AI scientist, a system capable of the long-horizon reasoning and experimental judgment needed to push the frontier on problems like these. We believe frontier AI, developed safely, can meaningfully accelerate progress across science and engineering. Getting there requires close collaboration with people who have spent years at the frontier of their fields.

The Anthropic STEM Fellows Program brings researchers and experts from across science and engineering into Anthropic for four months to take on the grand challenges of their fields with Claude. Working in small pods of Fellows from related fields, you will pair deep domain expertise with our frontier models and internal tooling to define the hardest open problems in your discipline, build the datasets and simulations that let us test and train Claude on them, and find exactly where it falls short.

We're looking for Fellows across science and engineering. Prior machine learning experience is helpful but not required. Scientific judgment and a willingness to learn quickly matter more.

Our first cohort of more than 20 STEM Fellows across mathematics, physics, the life sciences, and engineering, ran from June to September 2026. The problems they built now feed Claude's training and one of our internal science evaluations.

What to Expect:

• A place in a small pod of Fellows working on related problems in your domain. Your pod meets weekly with Anthropic researchers to share methods, pressure-test ideas, and build on each other's work.
• A grand challenge at the frontier of your field: an ambitious, open-ended problem scoped with our research team so you can make real progress in four months.
• Access to frontier Claude models and internal evaluation tooling.

Compensation:

$100,000–$167,000 USD for the four-month fellowship (equivalent to $300,000–$500,000 USD annualized), and other benefits.

Key responsibilities

• Setting grand challenges for your field: identifying long-horizon open problems where Claude falls short of expert judgment, and defining what real progress on them looks like.
• Building comprehensive datasets, simulations and rigorous, hard-to-game evaluations that test whether models can plan experiments, interpret data and reason about mechanisms, and systematically finding where they're confidently wrong.
• Applying Claude to open problems in your domain, using test-time compute strategies and integrating the scientific tools and software your field relies on.
• Are excited about the potential for AI to reason well about hard questions in their field where expert judgment matters.
• Hands‑on experience using Claude and Claude Code in your day‑to‑day workflow.
• Hold a PhD in a STEM field and have several years of experience (eg post‑doc or faculty).
• Are comfortable working in a fast‑paced, high‑agency atmosphere for a few months and delivering concrete results.
• Existing authorization to work in the United States for the duration of the program.

Logistics - Fellows

• The program runs from January 12th to May 8th 2027, and is full‑time for the duration; some fellowships may be considered for an extension.
• Applications are open until October 28, 2026, and we plan to make offers by November 20th. Later stages will typically include a take‑home exercise and conversations with our research team about your research interests and possible project directions.
• We ask that all Fellows attend a one‑week in‑person orientation in San Francisco.
• The default location is in San Francisco. We will consider remote engagements within the United States in certain circumstances.
• We are not currently able to sponsor visas for fellows. To participate in the Fellows program, you need to have or independently obtain full‑time work authorization in the United States.
• This is a fixed‑term contract position. Fellows are engaged through an employer of record, rather than employed directly by Anthropic.

The below are Anthropic's policies for full time roles. These do NOT apply to the Fellows Program.

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. But 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.

How we're different

We believe that the highest‑impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large‑scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long‑term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest‑impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit‑Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. 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.

Voluntary Self‑Identification

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As set forth in Anthropic’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

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