Senior Engineer, Bioinformatics

anthropic; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity donation matching

Flexible working hours

Vacation & parental leave

Modern office space

Job summary

Anthropic seeks a Senior Software Engineer on the Life Sciences team to build biology software that scientists and the research community can depend on. You will own large portions of code, decide when features are ready to ship, and stay engaged after launch to ensure reliability.

The role blends individual contribution with potential team leadership, spanning genomics and structural biology. You will engage with the broader biology software community and shape release-ready tools, datasets,

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background with ability to ship production-grade code.
• Experience with large-scale biology software is a plus.
• Familiarity with Python, Linux, and cloud/computing environments.
• Ability to design, test, and review software with CI/CD practices.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain biology software in genomics and structural biology for researchers and AI agents.
• Own the path from research code to public release, including testing, validation, benchmarking, and packaging.
• Maintain what we release: triage issues and review outside contributions.
• Represent the team in the biology community through conferences, workshops, and tutorials and translate learnings into priorities.
• Partner with team scientists to turn research code into well-tested, reusable software.
• Lead the technical direction of projects, potentially leading a small team.
• Build with Claude and AI coding agents as a central workflow and ensure agent-written code meets the same standards.
• Have built, released, and maintained biology software with evidence of adoption.
• Have deep working expertise in genomics or structural biology, data types and tools.
• Are proficient in Python and comfortable with large datasets in Linux and cloud environments.
• Practice rigorous testing and release engineering: unit/integration tests, CI, packaging, versioning.
• Use AI coding tools as a central part of how you build software and verify correctness of non-handwritten code.
• Have led a technical project with multiple contributors and can explain work clearly to biologists and engineers.

Skills

Python

Linux

Cloud computing

Rust or C++

Testing & CI

AI tooling (Claude)

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Claude

Job description

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

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Life Sciences team, you'll build biology software that our own scientists and the wider research community can depend on, and you'll be one of the main people representing that work to computational biologists outside Anthropic.

The Life Sciences team works to accelerate progress in biology with AI, combining frontier models with hands-on computational and experimental research. We want the tools, pipelines, datasets, and benchmarks we build in genomics and structural biology to be useful beyond our own projects, so we plan to release them to the community. Computational biology has a long tradition of open, shared software, and we want to contribute to it well. Every release should be something a researcher can install, run on their own data, and trust: correct on real inputs, validated against reference data and established methods, documented, versioned, and maintained after launch.

You'll own that standard. You'll write a large share of the code yourself, decide when something is ready to ship, and stay with it once people start using it. You'll also be an active member of the biology software community: maintaining public repositories, answering issues, speaking at conferences and workshops, and bringing what you hear from researchers back into what we build next.

We use Claude and AI coding agents heavily to build software, and we expect you to do the same across design, implementation, testing, and review. Code written by an agent is held to the same standard as code written by hand: you should understand it, test it, and measure its performance before it ships. We’re looking for someone with deep software engineering experience who already works this way.

The shape of the role is flexible. You might spend most of your time as an individual contributor, or you might lead a small group of engineers and scientists while continuing to contribute directly. Your focus can be genomics, structural biology, or both. Experience in other areas of computational biology is welcome, and we expect the work to range more widely over time.

What matters most is a record of biology software that other people have adopted and relied on.

This is a chance to shape how AI is put to work in biological research, on problems that matter for human health and scientific understanding. If building software that scientists trust is the work you want to do, we want to hear from you.

Key responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain biology software in genomics and structural biology (libraries, command-line tools, pipelines, datasets, and benchmarks) for use by researchers and AI agents, inside Anthropic and externally

Own the path from research code to public release, including testing, validation against reference data and established tools, benchmarking, documentation, and packaging, and make the call on when something is ready to ship

Maintain what we release: triage issues, review outside contributions, and manage breaking changes

Represent the team in the biology community through conferences, workshops, tutorials, and direct work with researchers and maintainers, and turn what you learn about their needs into priorities for the team

Partner with the team's computational and experimental scientists to turn research code into well-tested, reusable software

Lead the technical direction of the projects you own through design review, code review, and mentoring, and, depending on your interests and the team's needs, lead a small team

Build with Claude and AI coding agents as your default way of working, hold agent-written code to the same standard as your own, and set the team's practices for reviewing and validating it

Have built, released, and maintained biology software that researchers outside your own group use, with evidence of adoption you can point to (for example public repositories, package downloads, citations, or use in other groups' pipelines)

Have deep working expertise in genomics or structural biology, including the data types, file formats, standard tools, and common failure modes of at least one of these fields

Are proficient in Python and comfortable working with large datasets in Linux and cloud or cluster computing environments

Practice rigorous testing and release engineering: unit and integration tests, continuous integration, validation against reference data, packaging, and versioning

Use AI coding tools as a central part of how you build software, and can show how you verify the correctness and performance of code you did not write by hand

Have led a technical project with multiple contributors, setting direction and reviewing others' work while continuing to write code yourself

Can explain technical work clearly to both biologists and engineers, in writing (documentation, tutorials) and in person (talks, workshops)

Preferred qualifications

Depth in both genomics and structural biology

A record as the creator or a core maintainer of a widely used open-source tool in computational biology

Experience managing or formally leading a team of engineers or scientists

A graduate degree in computational biology, bioinformatics, computer science, or a related field, or equivalent experience

Proficiency in a systems language such as Rust, C++, or C, and experience with performance work on large biological datasets

Experience building software in other areas of computational biology, such as phylogenetics, proteomics, cheminformatics, or high-throughput screen analysis

Experience shipping software built largely with AI coding agents, building agentic systems on large language models, or training machine learning models on biological sequence or structure data

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.

$300,000 - $320,000 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.

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.

Voluntary Self-Identification

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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