Staff Research Engineer (AI)

Location: San Francisco, CA, United States. Hybrid policy: staff are expected to work from one of the offices at least 25% of the time, with some roles requiring more office presence.

Annual salary: $350,000–$850,000 USD.

Company

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

What you will do

• Identify and remove full-stack bottlenecks limiting progress toward scientific AGI.
• Develop approaches for long-horizon task completion and complex reasoning in scientific workflows.
• Scale research prototypes into production systems.
• Create benchmarks and evaluation frameworks for model capabilities, scientific workflows, and computer use.
• Implement distributed training systems and performance optimizations for large-scale model development.

Requirements

• 8+ years of machine learning research experience.
• Experience with large-scale language model training, evaluation, and inference pipelines.
• Expertise in performance optimization and distributed computing systems.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to identify technical bottlenecks in complex systems.
• Ability to translate research concepts into scalable engineering solutions and a record of shipping ML systems for challenging multi-step reasoning problems.
• Minimum education: a bachelor's degree or equivalent education, training, or experience in a relevant field.

Nice to have

• Experience with computer-use automation, agentic AI, or reinforcement learning for complex task completion.
• Knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, VM or sandboxing technologies, and cloud deployment at scale.
• Experience with large-scale data processing, infrastructure, scientific computing, or scientific AI applications.
• Published research or practical experience in long-horizon reasoning.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative research environment organized around several large-scale AI research efforts.
• Frequent research discussions focused on high-impact work and communication.
• Flexible working hours and an office designed for collaboration.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Optional equity donation matching.
• Visa sponsorship is available, with reasonable efforts and immigration-lawyer support, although sponsorship cannot be guaranteed for every role or candidate.