Software Engineer, Encoding Libraries

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:

The Encodings Infrastructure team maintains the libraries that engineers and researchers across Anthropic use to encode text and multimodal data into a form that Claude can consume. As a Software Engineer on this team youll own the design and maintenance of these libraries keeping their APIs intuitive their performance sharp and their abstractions solid enough that most of the org never has to think about encoding at all. Youll have the satisfaction of knowing that your work enabled Claude to learn new ways of understanding the world.

This role is unusually broad: your work will touch systems across the codebase from pretraining to finetuning to the API and youll collaborate closely with both researchers and engineers to make sure new encoding ideas can move quickly from experiment to production.

Responsibilities:

• Maintain and improve the encoding libraries used by engineers and researchers across Anthropic with a focus on clean user-friendly APIs

• Design data structures and abstractions that shield most of the organization from the details of how encoded data works while enabling power users

• Adapt the encoding libraries to support new research directions as they emerge and make sure that we can ship these research ideas to production

• Optimize encoding performance across the systems that depend on these libraries

• Work across Anthropics codebase to improve how encoded and unencoded data is handled

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 5 years of software engineering experience with meaningful time spent maintaining libraries SDKs or developer-facing APIs

• Have familiarity with ML terminology and LLM architecture you dont need to be an ML expert but enough understanding to work effectively alongside researchers

• Have experience carrying out complex refactors in large codebases

• Have strong communication skills and enjoy working closely with researchers and engineers to understand what they need

• Are results-oriented with a bias towards flexibility and impact

• Pick up slack even if it goes outside your job description

• Care about the societal impacts of your work

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

• Tokenizers or other text/data encoding systems

• Maintaining a widely-used library over a long period of time

• Performance optimization

• Python and/or Rust

• Reinforcement learning or model training infrastructure

Representative projects:

• Redesigning a core encoding abstraction so that downstream teams can adopt new encoding schemes without changing their code

• Working with a research team to add support for a new multimodal data type in the encoding libraries

• Auditing how encoded data flows through the finetuning and serving stacks and cleaning up inconsistencies

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