Research Engineer/Research Scientist, Pre-training

Anthropic; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 350,000 - 850,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity donation matching

Generous vacation

Parental leave

Flexible working hours

Office space

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a Research Engineer to join the Pre-training team in Seattle, combining cutting-edge research with practical engineering to build safe and steerable AI models.

The role emphasizes leading small research projects, improving training infrastructure, and contributing across the stack, from low-level optimizations to model design, with a strong focus on societal impact and collaboration.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field
• Strong software engineering skills with a proven track record of building complex systems
• Expertise in Python and experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch preferred)
• Familiarity with large-scale machine learning, particularly in the context of language models
• Ability to balance research goals with practical engineering constraints
• Strong problem-solving skills and a results-oriented mindset
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work in a collaborative environment
• Care about the societal impacts of your work

Responsibilities

• Conduct research and implement solutions in areas such as model architecture, algorithms, data processing, and optimizer development
• Independently lead small research projects while collaborating with team members on larger initiatives
• Design, run, and analyze scientific experiments to advance our understanding of large language models
• Optimize and scale our training infrastructure to improve efficiency and reliability
• Develop and improve dev tooling to enhance team productivity
• Contribute to the entire stack, from low-level optimizations to high-level model design

Skills

Software engineering

Python

Large-scale ML

Research-to-Engineering balance

Problem-solving

Communication

Societal impact

Education

MS/PhD in CS/ML

Tools

PyTorch

Kubernetes

GPUs

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.

Anthropic is at the forefront of AI research, dedicated to developing safe, ethical, and powerful artificial intelligence. Our mission is to ensure that transformative AI systems are aligned with human interests. We are seeking a Research Engineer to join our Pre‑training team, responsible for developing the next generation of large language models. In this role, you will work at the intersection of cutting‑edge research and practical engineering, contributing to the development of safe, steerable, and trustworthy AI systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct research and implement solutions in areas such as model architecture, algorithms, data processing, and optimizer development
• Independently lead small research projects while collaborating with team members on larger initiatives
• Design, run, and analyze scientific experiments to advance our understanding of large language models
• Optimize and scale our training infrastructure to improve efficiency and reliability
• Develop and improve dev tooling to enhance team productivity
• Contribute to the entire stack, from low-level optimizations to high-level model design

Qualifications

• Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field
• Strong software engineering skills with a proven track record of building complex systems
• Expertise in Python and experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch preferred)
• Familiarity with large-scale machine learning, particularly in the context of language models
• Ability to balance research goals with practical engineering constraints
• Strong problem‑solving skills and a results‑oriented mindset
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work in a collaborative environment
• Care about the societal impacts of your work

Preferred Experience

• Work on high-performance, large-scale ML systems
• Familiarity with GPUs, Kubernetes, and OS internals
• Experience with language modeling using transformer architectures
• Knowledge of reinforcement learning techniques
• Background in large-scale ETL processes

You’ll Thrive In This Role If You

• Have significant software engineering experience
• Are results‑oriented with a bias towards flexibility and impact
• Willingly take on tasks outside your job description to support the team
• Enjoy pair programming and collaborative work
• Are eager to learn more about machine learning research
• Are enthusiastic to work at an organization that functions as a single, cohesive team pursuing large-scale AI research projects
• Are working to align state of the art models with human values and preferences, understand and interpret deep neural networks, or develop new models to support these areas of research
• View research and engineering as two sides of the same coin, and seek to understand all aspects of our research program as well as possible, to maximize the impact of your insights
• Have ambitious goals for AI safety and general progress in the next few years, and you’re working to create the best outcomes over the long‑term.

Sample Projects

• Optimizing the throughput of novel attention mechanisms
• Comparing compute efficiency of different Transformer variants
• Preparing large-scale datasets for efficient model consumption
• Scaling distributed training jobs to thousands of GPUs
• Designing fault tolerance strategies for our training infrastructure
• Creating interactive visualizations of model internals, such as attention patterns

At Anthropic, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We strongly encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds, including those from underrepresented groups in tech.

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

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.

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.

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.