Research Engineer, Machine Learning (AI)

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

Annual salary: $500,000–$850,000 USD

Company

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

What you will do

• Develop reinforcement learning systems for large language models, including agentic models for computer use, autonomous software generation, and mathematical reasoning.
• Architect and optimize scalable RL infrastructure, training abstractions, distributed experiment management, and GPU-cluster workflows.
• Design and implement training environments, evaluations, and methodologies for RL agents.
• Improve performance through profiling, benchmarking, caching, and debugging distributed systems.
• Build automated testing frameworks, clean APIs, and scalable infrastructure in collaboration with research and engineering teams.
• Contribute to research direction while implementing novel approaches and bringing research innovations into deployed models.

Requirements

• Proficiency in Python and asynchronous or concurrent programming, such as with Trio.
• Experience with machine learning frameworks including PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
• Industry experience in machine learning research and the ability to balance research exploration with engineering implementation.
• Strong systems design, communication, code quality, testing, and performance skills.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent education, training, or professional experience in a relevant field.
• Commitment to developing safe and beneficial AI systems.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with LLM architectures, training methodologies, reinforcement learning techniques, and RL environments.
• Experience with virtualization, sandboxed code execution, Kubernetes, distributed systems, or high-performance computing.
• Experience with Rust or C++.
• Academic research experience, publications, or formal certifications are not required.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative research environment focused on large-scale AI research and frequent research discussions.
• Competitive compensation with optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Flexible working hours and an office environment for collaboration.
• Visa sponsorship is available, with immigration-lawyer support, although sponsorship cannot be guaranteed for every role or candidate.

Hiring process

• Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis; there is no application deadline.
• Candidates should review Anthropic’s guidance on AI usage during the application process.