Staff+ Software Engineer, Safeguards

Menlo Ventures; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 320,000 - 485,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Job summary

Menlo Ventures is seeking a Software Engineer in San Francisco to build safety mechanisms for AI systems. You will monitor models, prevent misuse, and ensure user well-being, focusing on enhancing system safety and preventing unwanted behaviors.

Candidates must have a Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field, with Python and Typescript proficiency. The role offers a competitive salary range of $320,000 to $485,000, with flexible working conditions and a focus on collaboration.

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.

Responsibilities

• Develop monitoring systems for detecting unwanted behaviors from API partners.
• Build abuse detection mechanisms and infrastructure.
• Surface abuse patterns to research teams for model training improvements.
• Build robust multi-layered defenses for safety mechanisms.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

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.

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.

Annual Salary: $320,000—$485,000 USD