Research Engineer Scientist, Societal Impacts

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

As a Research Engineer / Scientist on the Societal Impacts team youll design and build critical infrastructure that enables and accelerates foundational research into how our AI systems impact people and society. Your work will directly contribute to our research publications policy campaigns safety systems and products.

Our team combines rigorous empirical methods with creative technical approaches. Were currently grappling with big questions on how AI might impact the future of work peoples wellbeing education and more. Additionally we are continuously studying socio-technical alignment (what values do our systems have) and evaluating novel AI capabilities as they arise. We develop privacy-preserving tools to measure AIs effects at scale conduct mixed-methods studies of human-AI interaction and translate research insights into actionable recommendations for both product and policy. You can learn more about our team here

Strong candidates will have a track record of running & designing experiments relating to machine learning systems building data processing pipelines architecting & implementing high-quality internal infrastructure working in a fast-paced startup environment navigating the ambiguity inherent to novel empirical research and demonstrating an eagerness to develop their own research & technical skills. The ideal candidate will enjoy a mixture of running experiments developing new tools & evaluation suites working cross-functionally across multiple research and product teams and striving for beneficial & safe uses for AI.

For this role we are open to a 6-month residency at Anthropic with the expectation that residents convert to full-time if they do well in their residency.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement scalable technical infrastructure that enables researchers to efficiently run experiments and evaluate AI systems.
• Architect systems that can handle uncertain and changing requirements while maintaining high standards of reliability
• Lead technical design discussions to ensure our infrastructure can support both current needs and future research directions
• Partner closely with researchers data scientists policy experts and other cross-functional partners to advance Anthropics safety mission
• Interface with and improve our internal technical infrastructure and tools
• Generate net-new insights about the potential societal impact of systems being developed by Anthropic
• Ship changes that help improve our models and products based on the empirical research the Societal Impacts team is conducting

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have experience working with Research Scientists on ambiguous AI projects
• Have experience building and maintaining production-grade internal tools or research infrastructure
• Take pride in writing clean well-documented code in Python that others can build upon
• Are comfortable making technical decisions with incomplete information while maintaining high engineering standards
• Are comfortable getting up-to-speed quickly on unfamiliar codebases and can work well with other engineers with different backgrounds across the organization
• Have a track record of using technical infrastructure to interface effectively with machine learning models
• Have experience deriving insights from imperfect data streams
• Have experience building systems and products on top of LLMs
• Have experience incubating and maturing tooling platforms used by a wide variety of stakeholders

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

• Maintaining large foundational infrastructure
• Building simple interfaces that allow non-technical collaborators to evaluate AI systems
• Working with and prioritizing requests from a wide variety of stakeholders including research and product teams
• Distributed systems and can design for scale and reliability
• Scaling and optimizing the performance of tools
• Product management and/or full-stack product engineering with a track record of zero-to-one work in startup (or startup-like environments) and owning products end-to-end
• Research relating to the societal impacts of technology

Representative Projects:

• Design implement and mature scalable infrastructure for running large-scale experiments on how people interact with our AI systems (like Clio Anthropic Interviewer the Economic Index Values in the Wild and Emotional Impacts).
• Build robust monitoring systems that help us detect and understand potential misuse or unexpected behaviors
• Create internal tools that help researchers policy experts and product teams quickly analyze dynamically changing AI system characteristics

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 some cases we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. 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