Research Scientist, Discovery (Engineering & Applied Sciences)

Alex Loftus; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 500,000 - 850,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic Limited in San Francisco is seeking a Research Scientist for the Discovery team to advance AI science and engineering capabilities. You will design RL environments, evaluate models, and build production-ready training workflows across engineering and applied sciences.

The role emphasizes end-to-end experimentation with large language models, Python frameworks (PyTorch/JAX), and collaboration with researchers, engineers, and industry partners to safely advance Claude's capabilities and

Qualifications

• Experience with reinforcement learning and pre-training on large language models, including environment and reward design.
• Familiarity with large-scale language model training, evaluation, and inference pipelines.
• Published research or practical experience in AI for science or engineering, or in long-horizon reasoning.
• A degree or work experience in an engineering or applied science discipline (e.g., mechanical, electrical, materials, chemical, aerospace, systems, or manufacturing).
• Experience building simulators, surrogate models, or simulation-based environments and verifiers, and calibrating and validating them against real-world data.
• Experience with large-scale data pipelines and multimodal datasets.
• Demonstrated ability to work across multiple domains (language modeling, systems engineering, scientific computing).

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and study reinforcement learning environments, rewards, and training data to improve Claude's capabilities in engineering and applied sciences.
• Create benchmarks and evaluation frameworks for model performance on realistic workflows.
• Develop simulation-based training environments and verifiers with domain expert validation.
• Advance long-horizon task completion, multi-agent collaboration, and complex reasoning for engineering and research tasks.
• Research how models learn from experiments and real-world feedback.
• Study environment and reward behavior in large-scale training to ensure capable and well-aligned models.
• Scale research ideas from prototype to production training runs.
• Collaborate with domain experts and industry partners to test Claude’s inventions and translate feedback into training signals.

Skills

Reinforcement learning

Python

PyTorch

JAX

Large language models

Research methodology

Experiment design

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

TensorFlow

Job description

Research Scientist, Discovery (Engineering & Applied Sciences)

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

The Discovery team at Anthropic 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 and technological frontier.

We're expanding our work on engineering and the applied sciences. Our goal is to contribute to training Claude to invent, design, and engineer across every discipline and scale, reliably and safely: new manufacturing and experimental techniques, processes, materials, devices, instruments, machines, energy systems, and factories. We want this work to accelerate science and technology and benefit people widely.

To achieve these goals, we're seeking exceptional machine learning researchers with deep expertise in training and evaluating frontier models. In this role, you'll work end to end across the model stack, developing training environments, rewards, data, and evaluations that measure and improve Claude's performance on complex engineering and scientific tasks, and carrying what works into production training runs. You'll collaborate closely with researchers, engineers, and partners across Anthropic and industry to build AI systems that can engage in all phases of research and development, and that learn from real-world feedback. A background in engineering or the sciences is a plus but not required.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build, and study reinforcement learning environments, rewards, and training data that improve Claude's capabilities in engineering and the applied sciences
• Create benchmarks and evaluation frameworks that measure model performance on realistic engineering and scientific workflows
• Develop simulation-based training environments and verifiers, working with domain experts to validate them against real-world data
• Develop approaches to long-horizon task completion, multi-agent collaboration, and complex reasoning essential for real engineering and research work
• Research how models can learn efficiently from experiments and real-world feedback
• Study how environments and rewards behave in large-scale training, including robustness, calibration, and generalization, so that training produces models that are both capable and well aligned
• Scale research ideas from prototype to production training runs
• Collaborate with domain experts and industry partners to build and test what Claude invents, designs, and engineers, and turn that feedback into training and evaluation signal
• Help chart how Claude’s engineering capabilities reach real-world use: where they matter most, what stands in the way of adoption, and how that should shape research priorities
• Proficiency in Python and hands-on experience with a modern machine learning framework such as PyTorch or JAX
• Hands-on experience training or evaluating machine learning models
• Track record of machine learning research: forming hypotheses, designing and running experiments, and drawing sound conclusions from the results
• Ability to implement your own research ideas and diagnose problems in complex systems
• Ability to learn unfamiliar technical fields quickly and work productively with experts in them
• Clear communication and a collaborative approach to solving problems
• Excitement about improving Claude’s scientific capabilities and the downstream impact on science and technology
• Commitment to developing AI that is safe and beneficial

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with reinforcement learning and pre-training on large language models, including environment and reward design
• Familiarity with large-scale language model training, evaluation, and inference pipelines
• Published research or practical experience in AI for science or engineering, or in long-horizon reasoning
• A degree or work experience in an engineering or applied science discipline, such as mechanical, electrical, materials, chemical, aerospace, systems, or manufacturing engineering, applied physics, or computational simulation
• Experience building simulators, surrogate models, or simulation-based environments and verifiers, and calibrating and validating them against real-world data
• Experience with large-scale data pipelines and technical or multimodal datasets
• Demonstrated ability to work across multiple domains, such as language modeling, systems engineering, and scientific computing

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.

$500,000 - $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.

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.
Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you [e-mail] 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.

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As set forth in Anthropic’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

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