Research Engineer, Cybersecurity Reinforcement Learning

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 405,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Equity donation matching

Job summary

A leading AI research firm in San Francisco seeks a Research Engineer for the Cybersecurity RL team. You will advance AI capabilities in secure coding and vulnerability remediation, requiring both research and engineering skills. Ideal candidates have experience in cybersecurity research, machine learning, and strong software engineering skills. This position offers competitive compensation between $300,000 and $405,000 annually, with a hybrid work model allowing staff to be in the office at least 25% of the time.

Qualifications

• Experience in cybersecurity research required.
• Machine learning expertise desired.
• Strong software engineering skills necessary.

Responsibilities

• Help advance AI capabilities in secure coding.
• Design and implement RL environments.
• Conduct experiments and deliver production runs.

Skills

Cybersecurity research

Machine learning

Software engineering skills

Research exploration

AI enthusiasm

Education

Bachelor's degree in a related field

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 Horizons

The Horizons team leads Anthropic's reinforcement learning (RL) research and development, playing a critical role in advancing our AI systems. We've contributed to every Claude release, with significant impact on the autonomy, coding, and reasoning capabilities of Anthropic's models.

About The Role

We're hiring for the Cybersecurity RL team within Horizons. As a Research Engineer, you'll help to safely advance the capabilities of our models in secure coding, vulnerability remediation, and other areas of defensive cybersecurity.

This role blends research and engineering, requiring you to both develop novel approaches and realize them in code. Your work will include designing and implementing RL environments, conducting experiments and evaluations, delivering your work into production training runs, and collaborating with other researchers, engineers, and cybersecurity specialists across and outside Anthropic.

The role requires domain expertise in cybersecurity paired with interest or experience in training safe AI models. For example, you might be a white hat hacker who's curious about how LLMs could augment or transform your work, a security engineer interested in how AI could help harden systems at scale, or a detection and response professional wondering how models could enhance defensive workflows.

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Have experience in cybersecurity research.
• Have experience with machine learning.
• Have strong software engineering skills.
• Can balance research exploration with engineering implementation.
• Are passionate about AI's potential and committed to developing safe and beneficial systems.

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Professional experience in security engineering, fuzzing, detection and response, or other applied defensive work.
• Experience participating in or building CTF competitions and cyber ranges.
• Academic research experience in cybersecurity.
• Familiarity with RL techniques and environments.
• Familiarity with LLM training methodologies.

Annual Salary

$300,000—$405,000 USD

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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.

Inclusive Hiring

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Safety Note

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

Why Join Us

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. We value impact—advancing our long‑term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI—rather than small, 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 are an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure we pursue the highest-impact work at any time. 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.