Research Engineer, Safeguards Labs

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 Team

Safeguards Labs is a new team operating at the intersection of research and engineering chartered to investigate novel safety methods that protect Claude and the people who use it. We prototype new approaches to safe models usage safeguards and production safety pressure-testing ideas through offline analysis and subsets of traffic before they graduate into production systems run by our partner Safeguards teams. Our work overlaps closely with account abuse model behavior safeguards and other safeguard subteams and we serve as a research arm that can take on ambitious ambiguous problems and turn them into deployed defenses.

About the Role

Were hiring research engineers to define and execute the Labs research agenda. Youll scope your own projects run experiments end-to-end and decide when an idea is ready to hand off to a production team or when to kill it and move on. The team is small and being built deliberately around a roughly 3:1 mix of researchers to software engineers so each person has substantial latitude over what they work on and high leverage on the teams direction.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and contribute to research projects investigating new methods for detecting misuse of Claude identifying malicious organizations and accounts strengthening model safeguards and other safety needs.
• Design and run offline analyses over model usage data to surface abuse patterns build classifiers and detection systems and evaluate their effectiveness.
• Develop and iterate on prototypes that could eventually feed signals into the real-time safeguards path partnering with engineers on tech transfer.
• Contribute to a broader research portfolio investigating methods for detecting abusive behavior in chat-based or agentive workflows and for training the model to robustly refrain from dangerous responses or behaviors without over-refusing.
• Build evaluations and methodologies for measuring whether safeguards actually work including in agentic settings.
• Write up findings clearly so they inform decisions across Trust & Safety research and product teams.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have a track record of independently driving research projects from ambiguous problem statements to concrete results ideally in AI ML security integrity or a related technical field.
• Are comfortable scoping your own work and switching between research engineering and analysis as a project demands.
• Have working familiarity with how large language models operate sampling prompting training even if LLMs arent your primary background.
• Are proficient in Python and comfortable working with large datasets.
• Care about the societal impacts of AI and want your work to directly reduce real-world harm.

Strong candidates may also have:

• Experience building and training machine learning models including classifiers for abuse fraud integrity or security applications.
• Knowledge of evaluation methodologies for language models and experience designing evals.
• Experience with agentic environments and evaluating model behavior in them.
• Background in trust and safety integrity fraud detection threat intelligence or adversarial ML.
• Experience with red teaming jailbreak research or interpretability methods like steering vectors.
• A history of taking research prototypes and transferring them into production systems.

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelors degree or an equivalent combination of education training and/or experience

Required field of study:A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework training or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

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