Staff+ Software Engineer, Safeguards

Anthropic Limited; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 485,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic Limited in New York is seeking software engineers for the Safeguards team to build safety and oversight mechanisms for our AI systems. As a software engineer on this team, you will monitor models, prevent misuse, and ensure user well-being through robust detection and enforcement tools.

We have multiple teams within Safeguards; placement occurs after interviews to match interests and organizational needs.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or comparable professional experience.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language such as Python, Java, etc.
• 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 surface in dashboards for analysis.
• Build abuse detection mechanisms and infrastructure.
• Surface abuse patterns to research teams to harden models at training stage.
• Build robust, multi-layered defenses for real-time safety improvements at scale.

Skills

Python

Java

Across the stack

Strong communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Software Eng

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.

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 work to monitor models, prevent misuse, and ensure user well-being. This role will focus on building systems to detect unwanted model behaviors and prevent disallowed use of models. You will apply your technical skills to uphold our principles of safety, transparency, and oversight while enforcing our terms of service and acceptable use policies.

We have multiple teams that are currently hiring within Safeguards. Team placement occurs after the interview process, taking into account your interests and experience alongside organizational needs. This flexible approach allows us to match talented engineers where they'll have the greatest impact and growth potential.

Responsibilities

• Develop monitoring systems to detect unwanted behaviors from our API partners and potentially take automated enforcement actions; surface these in internal dashboards to analysts for manual review
• Build abuse detection mechanisms and infrastructure
• Surface abuse patterns to our research teams to harden models at the training stage
• Build robust and reliable multi-layered defenses for real-time improvement of safety mechanisms that work at scale

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or comparable professional experience
• Proficiency in at least one programming language such as Python, Java, etc.
• Ability to work across the stack
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders

Strong Candidates May Also

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

Deadline to apply:

None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

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

$320,000—$485,000 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.

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.

Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage:

Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.