Research Scientist, Life Sciences (Chemistry)

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

Anthropic's Life Sciences team is building a research group focused on biological discoveries by combining AI with hands-on biological research. We're seeking research scientists with deep medicinal chemistry expertise to join the team. Our goal is to speed up progress in the life sciences by an order of magnitude, and this role puts that mission into practice.

You'll be an expert medicinal chemist with hands-on experience designing, synthesizing, purifying, and characterizing small molecules. Above all, you'll close the loop between AI-generated hypotheses and experimental data to share with the community. Working alongside AI researchers and engineers, you'll drive experimental programs end to end and pressure-test AI-designed molecules and AI-proposed synthetic routes against real chemistry. This role is fully on-site in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Responsibilities

• Design multi-step synthetic routes for small molecules and oversee their execution end to end, including route selection, reaction optimization, purification strategy, and interpretation of full characterization data (NMR, LC-MS, HPLC)
• Coordinate synthesis and biological evaluation with external contract research organizations and academic partners
• Evaluate AI-designed molecules and AI-proposed synthetic routes, drive them to experimental readout, and feed results back to research teams
• Apply medicinal chemistry principles, including SAR analysis and physicochemical property optimization, to compound design and prioritization
• Ensure experimental data across programs is high quality and well documented, including procedures, spectra, and failure modes
• Communicate findings clearly to chemistry, AI research, and life sciences audiences

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• PhD in chemistry
• Demonstrated medicinal chemistry experience, including SAR-driven design and optimization of small molecules, with recent, sustained hands-on synthetic work
• Comfort navigating ambiguity and defining problems in a rapidly evolving research environment
• Ability to work independently while collaborating effectively across cross-functional teams, with strong written and verbal communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of medicinal chemistry experience beyond the PhD
• Track record of advancing programs from hit identification through lead optimization
• Experience directing synthetic chemistry activities at contract research organizations
• Computational chemistry, cheminformatics, or coding skills, for example Python with RDKit or pandas for data analysis and automation
• Experience using AI or ML tools in the life sciences
• Publications and/or patents demonstrating scientific impact

Pay

Annual Salary: $300,000—$320,000 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
• 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. 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.