Research Engineer​/Scientist, Alignment Science

About Anthropic

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.

You want to build and run elegant and thorough machine learning experiments to help us understand and steer the behavior of powerful AI systems. You care about making AI helpful, honest, and harmless, and are interested in the ways that this could be challenging in the context of human-level capabilities. You could describe yourself as both a scientist and an engineer.

As a Research Engineer on Alignment Science, you'll contribute to exploratory experimental research on AI safety, with a focus on risks from powerful future systems (like those we would designate as ASL-3 or ASL-4 under our Responsible Scaling Policy), often in collaboration with other teams including Interpretability, Fine‑Tuning, and the Frontier Red Team.

Our blog provides an overview of topics that the Alignment Science team is either currently exploring or has previously explored. For the London team, we are opportunistically hiring for the following research areas:

• AI Control: Creating methods to ensure advanced AI systems remain safe and harmless in unfamiliar or adversarial scenarios.
• Alignment Stress‑testing: Creating model organisms of misalignment to improve our empirical understanding of how alignment failures might arise.

Note:

Currently, the team’s hub is in San Francisco, so we require all candidates to be based at least 25% in London and travel to San Francisco occasionally. Additionally, we are prioritizing growing our San Francisco teams, so you may not hear back on your application to the London team unless we see an unusually strong fit. For this role, we conduct all interviews in Python.

• Testing the robustness of our safety techniques by training language models to subvert our safety techniques, and seeing how effective they are at subverting our interventions.
• Run multi-agent reinforcement learning experiments to test out techniques like AI Debate.
• Build tooling to efficiently evaluate the effectiveness of novel LLM-generated jailbreaks.
• Write scripts and prompts to efficiently produce evaluation questions to test models’ reasoning abilities in safety-relevant contexts.
• Contribute ideas, figures, and writing to research papers, blog posts, and talks.
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Run experiments that feed into key AI safety efforts at Anthropic, like the design and implementation of our Responsible Scaling Policy.

• Have significant software, ML, or research engineering experience.
• Have some experience contributing to empirical AI research projects.
• Have some familiarity with technical AI safety research.
• Prefer fast-moving collaborative projects to extensive solo efforts.
• Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description.
• Care about the impacts of AI.

• Have experience authoring research papers in machine learning, NLP, or AI safety.
• Have experience with LLMs.
• Have experience with reinforcement learning.
• Have experience with Kubernetes clusters and complex shared codebases.

• 100% of the skills needed to perform the job.
• Formal certifications or education credentials.

The annual compensation range for this role is below. For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity and benefits.

Annual Salary: £250,000—£370,000 GBP

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's 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 aren't able to successfully sponsor…