Software Engineer, Safeguards Labs

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.

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 before they graduate into production systems run by our partner Safeguards teams.

Were hiring software engineers to partner with our research engineers and turn promising prototypes into reliable production-grade safeguards. The team is small so each engineer has substantial latitude over what they work on and high leverage on the teams direction.

• Take research prototypes and harden them into production services that integrate with Anthropics real-time safeguards path.

• Build data and evaluation infrastructure that lets the team iterate on prototypes quickly and measure whether safeguards actually work including in agentic settings.

• Own deployment monitoring and reliability for systems Labs ships.

• Build internal tooling that helps investigators surface and act on abuse patterns.

• Collaborate with research engineers on scoping and contribute to decisions about which prototypes are ready to graduate.

• Strong proficiency in Python and comfort working with large datasets.

• A track record of designing building and operating production backend systems or data pipelines.

• Experience taking software from prototype to production including testing monitoring and reliability work.

• Working familiarity with how large language models operate even if LLMs arent your primary background.

• Care about the societal impacts of AI and want your work to directly reduce real-world harm.

• At least 5 years of software engineering experience.

• Experience deploying ML systems or classifiers into production.

• Background in trust and safety integrity fraud detection threat intelligence or adversarial ML.

• Experience building developer-facing tooling or platforms that accelerate research workflows.

• Familiarity with evaluation methodologies for language models.

• Experience with agentic environments.

• A history of partnering with researchers and successfully transferring prototypes into production.

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.

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.

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 policy for using AI in our application process.