Research Engineer, Chip Design RL

Location: San Francisco, CA; hybrid policy requiring staff to be in one of the offices at least 25% of the time, with some roles requiring more office time.

Annual salary: $500,000–$850,000 USD.

Company

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

What you will do

• Invent, design, and implement reinforcement learning environments and evaluations for agentic RTL generation, formal and other design verification, and physical design optimization.
• Optimize EDA-tool latency and develop proxy rewards as part of cross-cutting reinforcement learning work.
• Conduct experiments and shape the research roadmap.
• Deliver research into production training runs.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers across and outside Anthropic.

Requirements

• Expertise in ASIC or FPGA design, including RTL, design verification, UVM, formal methods, coverage-driven verification, physical design, synthesis, place-and-route, timing closure, PPA optimization, DFT, and ECOs.
• Fluency with industry EDA tools and processes.
• Experience taping out chips and taking designs from specification to silicon.
• Ability to balance research exploration with engineering implementation.
• Passion for AI's potential and commitment to developing safe and beneficial systems.
• Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience in a field relevant to the role, as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.
• Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements.

Nice to have

• Experience with reinforcement learning, evaluations, or environments.
• Experience building tooling or automation around chip design flows.
• Experience with ML accelerators or high-performance compute hardware.
• Familiarity with high-level synthesis or architecture simulators.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative research environment focused on large-scale efforts and high-impact, steerable, trustworthy AI.
• Frequent research discussions and emphasis on communication skills.
• Competitive compensation, flexible working hours, generous vacation and parental leave, and office-based collaboration.
• Optional equity donation matching.
• Visa sponsorship is available, with reasonable efforts and immigration-lawyer support for offers.