Senior Engineer (Bioinformatics)

Location: San Francisco, CA; hybrid policy requiring staff to be in an Anthropic office at least 25% of the time

Annual salary: $300,000–$320,000 USD

Company

Anthropic develops reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems and applies AI to biological research through its Life Sciences team.

What you will do

• Design, build, and maintain biology software, libraries, command-line tools, pipelines, datasets, and benchmarks for genomics and structural biology.
• Take research code through testing, validation against reference data and established tools, benchmarking, documentation, packaging, versioning, and public release.
• Maintain released software by triaging issues, reviewing external contributions, and managing breaking changes.
• Represent the work through conferences, workshops, tutorials, and collaboration with researchers and maintainers.
• Partner with computational and experimental scientists to create reusable software, while leading design reviews, code reviews, mentoring, and potentially a small team.
• Use Claude and AI coding agents across design, implementation, testing, and review, validating the correctness and performance of agent-written code.

Requirements

• Built, released, and maintained biology software adopted and used by researchers outside the candidate's own group, with evidence such as public repositories, package downloads, citations, or use in other groups' pipelines.
• Deep working expertise in genomics or structural biology, including relevant data types, file formats, standard tools, and common failure modes in at least one field.
• Proficiency in Python and comfort working with large datasets in Linux and cloud or cluster computing environments.
• Experience with rigorous testing and release engineering, including unit and integration tests, continuous integration, reference-data validation, packaging, and versioning.
• Use AI coding tools as a central part of software development and can verify the correctness and performance of code not written by hand.
• Led a technical project with multiple contributors, setting direction and reviewing work while continuing to write code.
• Can explain technical work clearly to biologists and engineers through documentation, tutorials, talks, and workshops.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience in a relevant field demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.

Nice to have

• Depth in both genomics and structural biology.
• Creator or core maintainer of a widely used open-source computational biology tool.
• Experience formally managing or leading engineers or scientists.
• Graduate degree in computational biology, bioinformatics, computer science, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Proficiency in Rust, C++, or C and experience improving performance on large biological datasets.
• Experience in phylogenetics, proteomics, cheminformatics, or high-throughput screen analysis.
• Experience shipping software built largely with AI coding agents, building agentic systems on large language models, or training machine learning models on biological sequence or structure data.

Culture & Benefits

• Work as part of a collaborative research organization focused on large-scale AI and biological research efforts.
• Flexible working hours, competitive compensation and benefits, equity donation matching, generous vacation, and parental leave.
• Visa sponsorship may be available; sponsorship cannot be guaranteed for every role or candidate, but Anthropic makes reasonable efforts and provides immigration-lawyer support.
• Frequent research discussions and emphasis on clear communication, impact, and diverse perspectives.

Hiring process

• Follow Anthropic's policy on candidate AI usage during the application process.
• Anthropic recruiters contact candidates from @anthropic.com addresses; candidates should verify openings through the official careers site and never pay fees or provide banking information before starting.