Applied AI Engineer, Public Sector (AI)

Location: Washington, DC, United States. The role works primarily on-site with customer engineering and mission teams in secure government facilities; Anthropic's hybrid policy expects staff to be in an office at least 25% of the time.

Annual salary: $280,000–$320,000 USD

Company

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

What you will do

• Advise national security mission programs through technical discovery, evaluation, deployment, and adoption.
• Help customer teams build production capabilities with Claude Code, the Claude API, and Claude for Enterprise.
• Translate mission requirements into technical architectures, customized pilots, prototypes, and evaluation suites.
• Develop frameworks for measuring Claude's performance in mission-specific use cases.
• Lead technical workshops, code reviews, engineering deep dives, and executive briefings.
• Coordinate with Sales, Product, Engineering, and Applied AI teams while contributing customer insights and reusable design patterns.

Requirements

• Active TS/SCI clearance with polygraph required.
• Prior experience with US intelligence community agencies as a government civilian or cleared contractor.
• 4+ years of experience in a technical role such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Product Engineer, Software Engineer, or Technical Product Manager.
• Strong programming skills in Python or TypeScript and experience building production applications.
• Hands-on expertise in cyber operations, cryptography, intelligence analysis, mission systems, CBRN and nonproliferation, or classified-system accreditation.
• Exceptional communication skills and the ability to work with engineers, executives, and cross-functional stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Production experience with LLMs, advanced prompt engineering, agent development, MCP, transcript analysis, evaluation frameworks, and deployment at scale.
• Experience operating software in air-gapped or classified environments.
• Experience designing scalable cloud architectures and integrating enterprise systems.
• Background in AI, machine learning, or data science.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and collaborate across organizations with integrity.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative work across research, engineering, policy, and business functions.
• Flexible working hours and an office environment designed for collaboration.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Competitive compensation and optional equity donation matching.
• Visa sponsorship is available, although eligibility depends on the role and candidate.