Research Engineer, Universes

Anthropic; New York (NY); On-site; USD 500,000 - 850,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is looking for a Research Engineer to contribute to developing safe and capable AI systems. In this role, you will design training environments, evaluate AI capabilities, and work collaboratively across teams to implement cutting-edge research in reinforcement learning. Candidates should demonstrate strong software engineering skills and a passion for impactful AI. Compensation ranges from $500,000 to $850,000 USD annually, reflecting the importance and complexity of the work.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering skills and can build robust infrastructure.
• Passionate about the potential impact of AI and committed to developing safe systems.
• Good research taste or senior technical experience identifying relevant aspects.

Responsibilities

• Build the next generation of agentic environments.
• Build rigorous evaluations that measure real capability.
• Collaborate across research and infrastructure teams.
• Debug and iterate across research and production ML stacks.
• Contribute to research culture through collaboration.

Skills

Impact-driven work

Strong software engineering skills

Good research taste

Ability to work with uncertainty

Experience in AI and safety

Pair programming

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 the Team

The Universes team within Research is responsible for training AI models to perform complex, difficult, long‑horizon agentic tasks in ultra‑realistic settings. We design and implement novel training environments that go far beyond what models can do today, enabling learning to navigate ambiguity, handle interruptions, maintain context over extended interactions, and exercise judgment in open‑ended scenarios.

About the Role

We are looking for Research Engineers to help build the next generation of training environments for capable and safe agentic AI. This role blends research and engineering responsibilities, requiring both implementation of novel approaches and contribution to research direction. You will work on fundamental research in reinforcement learning, design training environments and methodologies that push the state of the art, and build evaluations that measure genuine capability.

Responsibilities

• Build the next generation of agentic environments
• Build rigorous evaluations that measure real capability
• Collaborate across research and infrastructure teams to ship environments into production training
• Debug and iterate rapidly across research and production ML stacks
• Contribute to research culture through technical discussions and collaborative problem‑solving

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Are highly impact‑driven and care about outcomes, not activity
• Operate with high agency
• Have good research taste or senior technical experience, demonstrating good judgment in identifying what actually matters in complex problem spaces
• Can balance research exploration with engineering implementation
• Are passionate about the potential impact of AI and are committed to developing safe and beneficial systems
• Are comfortable with uncertainty and adapt quickly as the landscape shifts
• Have strong software engineering skills and can build robust infrastructure
• Enjoy pair programming

Strong Candidates May Also Have One or More of the Following

• Industry experience with large language model training, fine‑tuning or evaluation
• Industry experience building RL environments, simulation systems, or large‑scale ML infrastructure
• Senior experience in a relevant technical field even if transitioning domains
• Deep expertise in sandboxing, containerization, VM infrastructure, or distributed systems
• Published influential work in relevant ML areas

Annual Salary

$500,000—$850,000 USD