Research Engineer / Scientist, Alignment

About the role

You want to build and run elegant and thorough machine learning experiments to help us understand and steer the behavior of powerful AI systems. You care about making AI helpful, honest, and harmless, and are interested in the ways that this could be challenging in the context of human-level capabilities. You could describe yourself as both a scientist and an engineer.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to exploratory experimental research on AI safety, with a focus on risks from powerful future systems (like those we would designate as ASL-3 or ASL-4 under our Responsible Scaling Policy), often in collaboration with other teams including Interpretability, Fine-Tuning, and the Frontier Red Team.
• Test the robustness of our safety techniques by training language models to subvert our safety techniques, and see how effective they are at subverting our interventions.
• Run multi-agent reinforcement learning experiments to test out techniques like AI Debate.
• Build tooling to efficiently evaluate the effectiveness of novel LLM-generated jailbreaks.
• Write scripts and prompts to efficiently produce evaluation questions to test models’ reasoning abilities in safety-relevant contexts.
• Contribute ideas, figures, and writing to research papers, blog posts, and talks.
• Run experiments that feed into key AI safety efforts at Anthropic, like the design and implementation of our Responsible Scaling Policy.

Requirements

Note: For this role, we conduct all interviews in Python and prefer candidates to be based in the Bay Area.

Qualifications

• Significant software, ML, or research engineering experience
• Experience contributing to empirical AI research projects
• Familiarity with technical AI safety research
• Preference for fast-moving collaborative projects over extensive solo efforts
• Care about the impacts of AI

Skills

• Experience authoring research papers in machine learning, NLP, or AI safety
• Experience with LLMs
• Experience with reinforcement learning
• Experience with Kubernetes clusters and complex shared codebases

Benefits

Annual compensation range for this role is $350,000—$500,000 USD.

Pay

Annual Salary $350,000—$500,000 USD

Schedule

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.

Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage

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