Research Engineer, Life Sciences

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 350,000 - 500,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic Limited in San Francisco seeks an exceptional Research Engineer to join our Life Sciences team, merging machine learning engineering with biology to advance evaluation frameworks and training strategies that push the frontier of AI in biology.

You will work at the intersection of AI and biology, developing rigorous methods to measure model performance on complex tasks, and collaborating with world‑class researchers to build safe, impactful AI systems.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience training and evaluating large language models.
• Proficiency in Python and familiarity with modern ML development practices.
• Experience building and managing data pipelines for large-scale datasets.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and developing solutions in rapidly evolving research environments.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work independently while collaborating effectively across cross‑functional teams.

Skills

LLM training and evaluation

Python

Data pipelines

Ambiguity handling

Communication

Education

Graduate studies in biology/computational biology

8+ years ML experience

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 Role

We're seeking an exceptional Research Engineer to join our Life Sciences team at Anthropic. Our team is organized around the north star goal of accelerating progress in the life sciences, from early discovery through translation, by an order of magnitude. Our team likes to think across the whole model stack. In this role, you'll combine your deep expertise in machine learning engineering to develop novel evaluation frameworks and training strategies that push the frontier of what AI can achieve in biology.

You’ll work at the intersection of cutting‑edge AI and the biological sciences, developing rigorous methods to measure and improve model performance on complex scientific tasks.

You’ll collaborate closely with world‑class researchers and engineers to build AI systems that can engage in all phases of research and development, while maintaining our commitment to safety and beneficial impact.

Previous experience in life sciences is welcome, but not required for this role.

Minimum Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience training and evaluating large language models
• Proficiency in Python and familiarity with modern ML development practices
• Experience building and managing data pipelines for large-scale datasets
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and developing solutions in rapidly evolving research environments
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work independently while collaborating effectively across cross‑functional teams

Preferred Qualifications

• 8+ years of machine learning experience
• Prior work experience in AI and biology, including graduate studies (molecular biology, biochemistry, computational biology, or related fields)
• Experience working with large-scale biological datasets
• Published research or practical experience in scientific AI applications or long‑horizon reasoning
• Background in reinforcement learning and/or pretraining
• Knowledge of containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and cloud deployment at scale
• Demonstrated ability to work across multiple domains, such as language modeling, systems engineering, and scientific computing
• Contributions to open‑source scientific software or databases

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

Annual Salary

$350,000—$500,000 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.

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.