Staff Python Engineer: RL Frameworks for AI Research

Anthropic Limited; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 405,000 - 625,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic Limited in San Francisco invites an experienced engineer to design APIs and frameworks for reinforcement learning research, embedding with researchers and helping scale production RL infrastructure.

You will rotate across teams, improve reliability, and help define engineering standards. Strong Python, type safety, and collaboration skills are essential in a fast-paced, research-driven environment.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in Python with typing, async, concurrency, and performant Python code.
• Experience designing intuitive, safe APIs or frameworks used by teams.
• Proven ability to work in large, evolving research-style codebases.
• Ability to anticipate silent failure modes via design, type safety, and testing.
• Strong written and verbal communication across diverse teams.
• Comfort with ambiguity and driving work to a maintainable outcome.

Responsibilities

• Design widely-used APIs, frameworks, and abstractions with careful attention to interface legibility and principled defaults.
• Embed with research teams on a rotational basis: understand their engineering needs, build systems and APIs that support their work, and transfer ownership so teams can maintain those systems after you rotate off.
• Work directly in research codebases, improving reliability and structure without slowing down the research they support.
• Anticipate silent failure modes and prevent them structurally through type safety, well-designed invariants, targeted testing, and refactors that shrink the surface area for bugs.
• Contribute to the reliability of production RL systems, including monitoring, regression detection, and triage tooling.
• Help define engineering standards, review practices, and design patterns for a new team, and mentor researchers and engineers in adopting them.

Skills

Python

APIs & frameworks

Research codebases

System design

Type safety

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Job description

Anthropic Limited in San Francisco invites an experienced engineer to design APIs and frameworks for reinforcement learning research, embedding with researchers and helping scale production RL infrastructure.

You will rotate across teams, improve reliability, and help define engineering standards. Strong Python, type safety, and collaboration skills are essential in a fast-paced, research-driven environment.