Biological Safety Research Scientist

About Anthropic

Anthropics mission is to create reliable interpretable and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers engineers policy experts and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the Role

We are looking for biological scientists to help build safety and oversight mechanisms for our AI systems. As a Safeguards Biological Safety Research Scientist you will apply your technical skills to design and develop our safety systems which detect harmful behaviors and to prevent misuse by sophisticated threat actors. You will be at the forefront of defining what responsible AI safety looks like in the biological domain working across research policy and engineering to translate complex biosecurity concepts into concrete technical safeguards. This is a unique opportunity to shape how frontier AI models handle dual-use biological knowledgebalancing the tremendous potential of AI to accelerate legitimate life sciences research while preventing misuse by sophisticated threat actors.

In this role you will:

• Design and execute capability evaluations (evals) to assess the capabilities of new models
• Collaborate closely with internal and external threat modeling experts to develop training data for our safety systems and with ML engineers to train these safety systems optimizing for both robustness against adversarial attacks and low false-positive rates for legitimate researchers
• Analyze safety system performance in traffic identifying gaps and proposing improvements
• Develop rigorous stress-testing of our safeguards against evolving threats and product surfaces
• Partner with Research Product and Policy teams to ensure biological safety is embedded throughout the model development lifecycle
• Contribute to external communications including model cards blog posts and policy documents related to biological safety
• Monitor emerging technologies for their potential to contribute to new risks and new mitigation strategies and strategically address these

You may be a good fit if you have

• A PhD in molecular biology virology microbiology biochemistry systems or computational biology or a related life sciences field OR equivalent professional experience
• Extensive experience in scientific computing and data analysis with proficiency in programming (Python preferred)
• Deep expertise in modern biology including both reading (e.g. high-throughput measurement functional assays) and writing (gene synthesis genome editing strain construction protein engineering) techniques in biology
• Familiarity with dual-use research concerns select agent regulations and biosecurity frameworks (e.g. Biological Weapons Convention Australia Group guidelines)
• Strong analytical and writing skills with the ability to navigate ambiguity and explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• Have a passion for learning new skills and an ability to rapidly adapt to changing techniques and technologies
• Comfort working in a fast-paced environment where priorities may shift as AI capabilities evolve

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in AI/ML systems particularly experience with large language models
• Experience in developing ML for biological systems
• Extensive experience in complex projects with multiple stakeholders

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelors degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship:We do sponsor visas! However we arent able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if youre interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones were building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Your safety matters to us.To protect yourself from potential scams remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you addresses. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money fees or banking information before your first day. If youre ever unsure about a communication dont click any linksvisit for confirmed position openings.

How were different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact advancing our long-term goals of steerable trustworthy AI rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. Were an extremely collaborative group and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic including: GPT-3 Circuit-Based Interpretability Multimodal Neurons Scaling Laws AI & Compute Concrete Problems in AI Safety and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits optional equity donation matching generous vacation and parental leave flexible working hours and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates AI Usage:Learn aboutour policyfor using AI in our application process