Staff+ Software Engineer, Claude Science

United States Digital Space LLC; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 405,000 - 485,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is building Claude Science, an AI workbench designed for researchers. You will shape a product in a new category, collaborating with scientists, researchers, and product teams to drive end-to-end ownership and production-ready features.

You’ll help push model capabilities into real-world applications, align teams, and steer the architecture as the product evolves in a rapidly growing environment.

Qualifications

• Minimum 8 years of software engineering experience, with leadership exposure.
• Experience turning AI research into production-ready products.
• Ability to work with researchers and product/design teams to ship features.
• Comfort translating technical learnings for non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Ship features on a roadmap shaped with stakeholders, in a new category.
• Interface with scientists and researchers, translating needs into engineering priorities.
• Partner with product and design to turn scientist workflows into shipped products.
• Collaborate with research to improve model capabilities and evaluation.

Skills

8+ years

Staff leadership

AI product experience

Cross-functional

Owner mindset

Education

Bachelor's degree

Job description

About the company

the company’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 company’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We believe powerful AI can compress a century of scientific progress into a decade. Claude Science is a big part of building toward that future.

Claude Science is an AI workbench that gives researchers a single environment for work that today spans dozens of disconnected tools — literature, specialized databases, scientific computing, analysis, and publication-ready outputs. Claude Science already renders protein structures, genome tracks, and chemical structures natively, and coordinates multi-agent workflows with built-in review for citation and calculation errors — and we’re just getting started. Much of this is being built 0→1 right now: you’ll shape both the product and the architecture in a category no one has defined yet.

You’ll be a technical leader who thinks holistically about the end-to-end researcher experience, partners directly with our internal research team to push model capabilities into production, and carries real ownership over what we ship next.

Our north star is accelerating scientific progress — across biology, chemistry, physics, and beyond — from early discovery through real-world application, by an order of magnitude. This work supports programs like the company’s AI for Science Program and our rare disease research grants.

What you’ll do

• Ship fast against a roadmap you help shape: this is a product in a category no one has defined yet, and the highest-leverage problems are still unclaimed
• Interface directly with working scientists — academic labs, industry R&D teams, and research institutes — during key conversations, translating what you learn into engineering priorities
• Partner with product and design to turn how scientists actually work — from hypothesis to analysis to publication — into shipped product
• Work closely with research to make the models better at science: shaping evals, surfacing failure modes, and feeding what users hit in the real world back into model development

You may be a good fit if you

• Have 8+ years of software engineering experience, ideally with 2+ years at a Staff or equivalent technical leadership level
• Have built products from 0 to 1 in fast-moving environments, and can set technical direction with limited precedent to lean on
• Have built AI products and know what it takes to turn model capabilities into applications people actually use
• Are comfortable working directly with technical domain experts and translating what you learn
• Drive cross-team alignment to ship impactful work, with influence over authority

Strong candidates may also have

• Background in chemistry, biology, physics, or another science
• Experience working with research teams to improve domain-specific model capabilities, including evaluation frameworks

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:

$405,000 — $485,000 USD

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 the company 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 the company, 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!

the company is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and bene