AI Research Scientist

Anthropic’s 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:

You’re excited to work at an organization that functions as a single, cohesive team pursuing large-scale AI research projects. You’re working to align state of the art models with human values and preferences, understand and interpret deep neural networks, or develop new models to support these areas of research. You view research and engineering as two sides of the same coin, and seek to understand all aspects of our research program as well as possible, to maximize the impact of your insights. You have ambitious goals for AI safety and general progress in the next few years, and you’re working to create the best outcomes over the long-term.

Note: This is an “evergreen” role that we keep open on an ongoing basis. We receive many applications for this position, and you may not hear back from us directly if we do not currently have an open role on any of our teams that matches your skills and experience. We encourage you to apply despite this, as we are continually evaluating for top talent to join our team. You are also welcome to reapply as you gain more experience, but we suggest only reapplying once per year.

We may also put up separate, team-specific job postings . when In those cases, the teams will give preference to candidates who apply to the team-specific postings, so if you are interested in a specific team please make sure to check for team-specific job postings!

You May Be a Good Fit If You:

• (Required) Have at least 1 research project related to machine learning in which you played a major role

Strong Candidates May Also:

• Clearly articulate and discuss the motivations behind your work, and teach us about what you’ve learned.
• Like writing up and communicating your results, even when they’re null.
• Like working on a team and making collaborative, data-driven research decisions.
• Believe that a great way to discover a new, big-picture vision is to first get involved in the details.
• Have experience doing quantitative science in another field.

Representative Projects:

• Design a new method for automatically red teaming language models for harmful behavior
• Create evaluation datasets for potential, new dangerous capabilities of language models such as persuasion or deception
• Compare the compute efficiency of two Transformer variants
• Create an interactive visualization of attention between tokens in a language model

Annual Salary:

The expected salary range for this position is:

$280,000 — $600,000 USD

Logistics:

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.

US visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren’t able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate; operations roles are especially difficult to support. But if we make you an offer, we will make every effort to get you into the United States, 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 you’re interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we’re 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.

Compensation and Benefits:

Anthropic’s compensation package consists of three elements: salary, equity, and benefits. We are committed to pay fairness and aim for these three elements collectively to be highly competitive with market rates.

Equity – On top of this position’s salary (listed above), equity will be a major component of the total compensation. We aim to offer higher-than-average equity compensation for a company of our size, and communicate equity amounts at the time of offer issuance.

US Benefits – The following benefits are for our US-based employees:

• Optional equity donation matching at a 3:1 ratio, up to 50% of your equity grant.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and all your dependents.
• 401(k) plan with 4% matching.
• 22 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Unlimited PTO – most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more!
• Stipends for education, home office improvements, commuting, and wellness.
• Fertility benefits via Carrot.
• Daily lunches and snacks in our office.
• Relocation support for those moving to the Bay Area.

UK Benefits – The following benefits are for our UK-based employees:

• Optional equity donation matching at a 3:1 ratio, up to 50% of your equity grant.
• Private health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents.
• Pension contribution (matching 4% of your salary).
• 21 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Unlimited PTO – most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more!
• Health cash plan.
• Life insurance and income protection.
• Daily lunches and snacks in our office.
• This compensation and benefits information is based on Anthropic’s good faith estimate for this position as of the date of publication and may be modified in the future. Employees based outside of the UK or US will receive a different benefits package. The level of pay within the range will depend on a variety of job-related factors, including where you place on our internal performance ladders, which is based on factors including past work experience, relevant education, and performance on our interviews or in a work trial.

How we’re 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. We’re 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. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both as needed.