Research Engineer, Discovery

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 350,000 - 850,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity donation matching

Vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Office space

Job summary

Anthropic Limited in San Francisco is seeking a Research Engineer to work end to end across the model stack, identifying and addressing infra blockers on the path to scientific AGI. You will contribute to performance optimization, distributed systems, VM/sandboxing, and large-scale data pipelines to enable safe, steerable AI.

Join a team of researchers and engineers advancing AI capabilities while ensuring safety and reliability. Hybrid work policy applies with on-site collaboration in SF.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of infrastructure engineering experience with large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong written and verbal communication and collaboration skills.
• Deep knowledge of performance optimization techniques and system architectures for high-throughput ML workloads.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement large-scale infrastructure systems for AI model training, evaluation, and deployment in distributed environments.
• Identify and resolve infrastructure bottlenecks hindering progress toward scientific capabilities.
• Develop robust evaluation frameworks to measure progress toward SAFER, steerable AI.
• Build scalable VM/sandboxing/container architectures for long-horizon AI tasks and workflows.
• Collaborate with researchers to translate experimental requirements into production-ready infra.
• Develop data pipelines to support advanced language model training and inference.

Skills

Distributed systems

Containerization

VM sandboxing

Data pipelines

Performance optimization

Collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Docker

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 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 Team

Our team is organized around the north star goal of building an AI scientist – a system capable of solving the long term reasoning challenges and basic capabilities necessary to push the scientific frontier.

About The Role

As a Research Engineer on our team you will work end to end across the whole model stack, identifying and addressing key infra blockers on the path to scientific AGI. Strong candidates should have familiarity with elements of language model training, evaluation, and inference and eagerness to quickly dive and get up to speed in areas they are not yet an expert on. This may include performance optimization, distributed systems, VM/sandboxing/container deployment, and large scale data pipelines. Join us in our mission to develop advanced AI systems pushing the frontiers of science and benefiting humanity.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement large-scale infrastructure systems to support AI scientist training, evaluation, and deployment across distributed environments
• Identify and resolve infrastructure bottlenecks impeding progress toward scientific capabilities
• Develop robust and reliable evaluation frameworks for measuring progress towards scientific AGI.
• Build scalable and performant VM/sandboxing/container architectures to safely execute long-horizon AI tasks and scientific workflows
• Collaborate to translate experimental requirements into production-ready infrastructure
• Develop large scale data pipelines to handle advanced language model training requirements
• Optimize large scale training and inference pipelines for stable and efficient reinforcement learning

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Have 6+ years of highly-relevant experience in infrastructure engineering with demonstrated expertise in large-scale distributed systems
• Are a strong communicator and enjoy working collaboratively
• Possess deep knowledge of performance optimization techniques and system architectures for high-throughput ML workloads
• Have experience with containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) and orchestration at scale
• Have proven track record of building large-scale data pipelines and distributed storage systems
• Excel at diagnosing and resolving complex infrastructure challenges in production environments
• Can work effectively across the full ML stack from data pipelines to performance optimization
• Have experience collaborating with other researchers to scale experimental ideas
• Thrive in fast-paced environments and can rapidly iterate from experimentation to production

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Experience with language model training infrastructure and distributed ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, etc.)
• Background in building infrastructure for AI research labs or large-scale ML organizations
• Knowledge of GPU/TPU architectures and language model inference optimization
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) at enterprise scale
• Familiarity with VM and container orchestration.
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools and experiment management systems
• History working with large scale reinforcement learning
• Comfort with large scale data pipelines (Beam, Spark, Dask, …)

Annual Salary

$350,000—$850,000 USD

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.

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.

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.