Staff+ Software Engineer, Safeguards

Menlo Ventures; New York (NY); On-site; USD 320,000 - 485,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity donation matching

Flexible hours

Office space

Vacation & parental leave

Job summary

Anthropic is hiring software engineers to build safety and oversight mechanisms for AI systems. As a member of the Safeguards team, you will monitor models, prevent misuse, and ensure user wellbeing with scalable defenses and automated enforcement actions.

You will contribute to detecting unwanted model behaviors, surface abuse patterns to research teams, and strengthen safeguards across the stack using Python and TypeScript.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or comparable experience.
• Proficiency in Python and Typescript.
• Ability to work across the stack.
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts to non‑technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Develop monitoring systems to detect unwanted behaviors from API partners and take automated enforcement actions, surfacing results on internal dashboards for analysts.
• Build abuse detection mechanisms and infrastructure.
• Surface abuse patterns to research teams to harden models during training.
• Build robust and reliable multi-layered defenses for real‑time improvement of safety mechanisms that work at scale.

Skills

Python

Typescript

Cross-stack development

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering

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 Role

We are looking for software engineers to help build safety and oversight mechanisms for our AI systems. As a software engineer on the Safeguards team, you will monitor models, prevent misuse, and ensure user well‑being. The role focuses on building systems to detect unwanted model behaviors and prevent disallowed use of models, applying technical skills to uphold our principles of safety, transparency, and oversight while enforcing our terms of service and acceptable use policies.

Responsibilities

• Develop monitoring systems to detect unwanted behaviors from API partners and take automated enforcement actions, surfacing results on internal dashboards for analysts.
• Build abuse detection mechanisms and infrastructure.
• Surface abuse patterns to research teams to harden models during training.
• Build robust and reliable multi-layered defenses for real‑time improvement of safety mechanisms that work at scale.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or comparable experience.
• Proficiency in Python and Typescript.
• Ability to work across the stack.
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts to non‑technical stakeholders.

Additional Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering.
• Experience with integrity, spam, fraud, or abuse detection and mitigation.
• Experience building trust and safety detection mechanisms and intervention for AI/ML systems.
• Experience with prompt engineering, jailbreak attacks, and other adversarial inputs.
• Experience working closely with operational teams to build custom internal tooling.

Salary & Benefits

Annual salary: $320,000—$485,000 USD.

Benefits include competitive compensation, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues.

Logistics

Location‑based hybrid policy: we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time.

Visa sponsorship: we do sponsor visas for eligible candidates.

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.