Applied AI Engineer, Startups (Life Sciences)

Location: San Francisco, CA or New York City, NY; hybrid, with staff expected to work from an office at least 25% of the time

Annual salary: $280,000–$320,000 USD

Company

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

What you will do

• Advise life sciences and biotech startups on building Claude-powered products and research workflows.
• Partner with startup engineers and scientists through pair programming, architecture reviews, technical workshops, and implementation guidance.
• Develop prototypes, technical documentation, evaluation suites, benchmarks, architecture diagrams, and scalable reference implementations.
• Create domain-specific MCP servers and agent skills for genomics platforms, literature databases, experimental repositories, and other scientific workflows.
• Identify recurring challenges such as heterogeneous data, auditability, and the gap between prototypes and systems scientists trust, then share insights with Product, Engineering, Research, and Applied AI teams.
• Represent Anthropic in the life sciences startup ecosystem through hackathons, webinars, office hours, founder events, and customer-site workshops; travel to customer sites as needed.

Requirements

• Deep experience in life sciences or biotech, including areas such as genomics, drug discovery, molecular design, lab automation, or clinical development.
• 4+ years of technical experience as a software engineer, ML or research engineer, computational biologist, research scientist, or technical founder.
• Production experience building LLM-powered applications, including prompting, context engineering, agent architectures, evaluation frameworks, and deployment at scale, or demonstrated experience applying AI to scientific work.
• Experience with startups or high-growth companies and the ability to work effectively with founders and small teams.
• Strong technical communication skills for translating complex AI concepts into architecture and implementation plans for engineering and scientific audiences.
• Minimum education: bachelor's degree or equivalent relevant education, training, or experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative environment focused on safe, trustworthy, and beneficial AI research.
• Competitive compensation with optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Flexible working hours and an office environment designed for collaboration.
• Visa sponsorship is available, subject to role and candidate eligibility.