Research Associate, Biology

About the role

We are hiring Research Associates: early-career bench scientists who will join a small team to help establish our biology research program. You'll work directly alongside senior scientists, executing and troubleshooting experiments at the bench while learning advanced techniques in a fast-moving, highly collaborative environment.

Key responsibilities

• Execute molecular biology and biochemistry experiments at the bench under the direction of senior scientists
• Maintain meticulous, reproducible records and contribute to shared protocols
• Troubleshoot experiments, propose adjustments, and present results clearly in group meetings
• Maintain mammalian and bacterial cell lines, materials stocks, and reagent inventories
• Learn and adopt new techniques rapidly as projects evolve, with training provided

Minimum qualifications

• Hands-on research experience in molecular biology, biochemistry, or a closely related field
• Proficient with foundational molecular biology techniques: PCR, gel electrophoresis, molecular cloning, and plasmid preparation
• Experience with aseptic technique and bacterial or mammalian cell culture, and with nucleic acid extraction, purification, and quantification
• Carefully follow, document, and adapt experimental protocols
• Highly motivated, eager to learn, and energized by hands-on bench work
• Practical and resourceful — willing to find ways to accomplish tasks rather than finding reasons why they can’t be done
• Listen carefully, take feedback well, ask good questions, and are comfortable when priorities shift quickly
• Excited to use AI models as a tool at the bench to plan experiments, interpret data, and decide what to try next

Preferred qualifications

• A BS or MS in molecular biology, biochemistry, chemical biology, microbiology, bioengineering, or a related discipline
• Protein expression and purification experience (e.g., affinity, SEC, IEX)
• Mammalian cell culture experience, including transfection and stable line maintenance
• Enzyme kinetics or quantitative biochemical assay development (fluorescence, absorbance, FRET)
• Next-generation sequencing library preparation experience
• Familiarity with common bioinformatics workflows and molecular biology software (e.g., sequence analysis, alignment, primer and construct design)
• Experience using AI tools such as Claude in a research setting — for literature review, protocol drafting, data interpretation, or experimental troubleshooting

Annual compensation range

The annual compensation range for this role is $65,000—$85,000 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.
• 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.

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.