Biological Safety Research Manager

EngineersOfAI; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 480,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a hands-on manager for its Safeguards organization to lead research engineering focused on biological safety evaluations and classifiers. You will grow a team of researchers and engineers, set technical direction, and ensure rigorous evaluation of models in production traffic.

You will review eval designs, understand classifier failures, and communicate progress to research, product, and policy partners while maintaining technical depth.

Qualifications

• Experience managing a technical team, including hiring, coaching, and performance management.
• A record of setting technical direction for a team and making prioritization calls under uncertainty.
• Proficiency in Python, with a background in scientific programming and data analysis.
• Knowledge of modern biology across both measurement and engineering: high-throughput assay.

Responsibilities

• Manage, coach, and grow a team of research scientists and engineers working on biological safety evaluations and classifiers, including hiring, onboarding, performance, and career development.
• Set the technical direction and roadmap for the biological safety research agenda, and make the calls about what the team builds, what it deprioritizes, and when a safeguard is ready to ship.
• Own the quality of capability evaluations that assess what new models can do in the biological domain, and turn results into deployment recommendations that leadership can act on.
• Guide the development of training and evaluation datasets for our safety classifiers, working with internal and external threat modeling experts to ground them in realistic risk.
• Oversee the training and iteration of safety classifiers alongside ML engineers, optimizing jointly for adversarial robustness and low false-positive rates.
• Ensure the team invests in the tooling and pipelines that make evaluation and classifier development fast and repeatable.
• Establish how the team measures classifier and eval performance against production traffic, identifies gaps, and prioritizes improvements.
• Direct red-teaming and stress-testing of safeguards as threats, models, and product surfaces evolve.
• Partner with Research, Product, Policy, and government affairs colleagues to embed biological safety throughout the model development lifecycle, and serve as an escalation point for biological content.
• Represent the team's work in external communications including model cards, blog posts, and policy documents
• Track developments in biology, machine learning, and biosecurity for their potential to create new risks or enable new mitigations

Skills

Python

ML fundamentals

Biology knowledge

Job description

Anthropic is seeking a hands-on manager for its Safeguards organization to lead research engineering focused on biological safety evaluations and classifiers. You will grow a team of researchers and engineers, set technical direction, and ensure rigorous evaluation of models in production traffic.

You will review eval designs, understand classifier failures, and communicate progress to research, product, and policy partners while maintaining technical depth.