Research Manager, Biological Safety

Location: San Francisco, California, United States; hybrid, with staff expected to work from an office at least 25% of the time

Annual salary: $405,000–$485,000 USD

Company

Anthropic builds reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems designed to be safe and beneficial for users and society.

What you will do

• Manage, coach, hire, and develop research scientists and engineers working on biological safety evaluations and classifiers.
• Set the technical direction and roadmap for biological safety research, including prioritization and safeguard launch decisions.
• Lead capability evaluations of frontier models in biological domains and translate findings into deployment recommendations.
• Guide the creation of training and evaluation datasets for safety classifiers and oversee classifier training with ML engineers.
• Establish tooling, pipelines, and measurement practices for evaluating safeguards against production traffic.
• Direct red-teaming and stress-testing while partnering with Research, Product, Policy, government affairs, and external stakeholders.

Requirements

• Experience managing a technical team, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and technical prioritization.
• Proficiency in Python, scientific programming, and data analysis, with a solid grasp of ML fundamentals.
• Knowledge of modern biology spanning high-throughput assays, functional characterization, gene synthesis, genome editing, strain construction, and protein engineering.
• Experience designing quantitative experiments or evaluations and drawing defensible conclusions from noisy results.
• Familiarity with dual-use research and biosecurity frameworks, including select agent regulations, the Biological Weapons Convention, or Australia Group guidelines.
• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent relevant education, training, or experience.

Nice to have

• 3+ years of people management experience, ideally leading research scientists, research engineers, or ML engineers.
• 8+ years of hands-on life sciences experience in areas such as molecular biology, drug discovery, or computational biology.
• Experience with large language models, production ML classifiers, biological ML methods, adversarial robustness, red-teaming, or ML safety evaluation.
• Experience building a team or function from a small headcount and leading complex cross-functional technical projects.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative research environment focused on a small number of large-scale AI research efforts.
• Competitive compensation and benefits with optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Flexible working hours and an office designed for collaboration.
• Visa sponsorship is available, with immigration lawyer support, subject to role and candidate eligibility.