Software Engineer, Infrastructure, Interpretability

About the role

When you see what modern language models are capable of, do you wonder, "How do these things work? How can we trust them?" The Interpretability team at Anthropic works to understand what's actually happening inside trained models—and applies our best techniques to keep frontier AI safe as it rapidly improves. Think of us as doing "neuroscience" of neural networks using "microscopes" we build—or reverse-engineering neural networks like binary programs.

This role is an early hire on a new infrastructure effort within Interpretability: you'll help define its charter, not just execute it. Interpretability research requires deep access to frontier models while retaining a high degree of research flexibility. Your job is to build the paved path that makes that access secure by default, private by design, and low-friction for every researcher.

The work spans four areas:

• Security: design the secure-by-default environments and access patterns that enable deep model access for an organization whose research requires it—done well, the same design improves both our security posture and research productivity.
• Privacy: build data-access patterns that ensure policy adherence as our research moves from theory into practical application.
• Data & Compute Management: manage research data at petabyte scale and make efficient use of large accelerator fleets—storage lifecycle, capacity planning, and scheduling.
• Developer experience: agentic engineering, tooling, and observability that keep researchers moving fast.

In this role, you’ll be deeply embedded alongside Interpretability Researchers to understand their workflows—building your understanding of the research as you go. At the same time, you’ll bridge communication with Anthropic’s wider platform and security teams. Every hour of researcher friction you remove is multiplied across the whole organization, and the infrastructure you build sets the pace at which interpretability results reach real safety decisions.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own shared infrastructure for Interpretability—research environments, data systems, and compute tooling that researchers rely on daily.
• Lead cross-team efforts with our agentic engineering, security, compute, and storage platform teams, so that company-wide solutions serve research needs.
• Discover and resolve major organization-wide developer experience issues.
• Help take interpretability methods from research code to dependable audit pipelines.

Requirements

• Highly proficient in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Rust, Go, Java) and productive with Python.
• Significant experience building and operating secure and scalable software infrastructure—cloud systems, distributed systems, or developer tooling.
• Strong cross-functional communication skills—equally at home working with researchers and with platform and security teams.
• Extremely curious about unfamiliar domains.
• Strong ability to prioritize the most impactful work and are comfortable operating with ambiguity and questioning assumptions.
• Curious about interpretability research and its role in AI safety (though no research experience is required!).
• Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work.

Skills

Strong candidates may also have:

• Experience with cloud infrastructure (e.g., GCP or AWS), Kubernetes, networking, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Security engineering experience: identity/auth/access management, sandboxing, red teaming.
• Experience with data warehousing, large-scale storage systems, and data lifecycle management—especially for research.
• Experience with compute schedulers and accelerator fleet management.
• Experience building developer productivity tooling and observability stacks.
• Experience building tooling to accelerate research teams.

Representative Projects

• Design and stand up a hardened research environment where researchers experiment directly on frontier model weights.
• Build lifecycle management for petabytes of research data—visibility, retention, and cost efficiency.
• Build self-serve scheduling and capacity tooling.
• Create the observability that catches infrastructure regressions before they cost researchers valuable time.

Schedule

This role is based in the San Francisco office; however, we are open to considering exceptional candidates for remote work on a case-by-case basis.

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.

Pay

Annual Salary: $320,000 - $485,000 USD

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits.
• Optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Flexible working hours.
• A lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues.

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.