Research Engineer​/Research Scientist, Pretraining

Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Pretraining

About Anthropic:
Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems that are safe and beneficial for users and society. Our team is a rapidly growing group of researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build these systems.

We are seeking passionate Research Scientists and Engineers to join our growing Pre‑training team in Zurich. The team primarily focuses on multimodal capabilities—giving large language models the ability to understand and interact with modalities beyond text—and on developing the next generation of large language models while ensuring they are safe, steerable, and trustworthy.

• Conduct research and implement solutions in areas such as model architecture, algorithms, data processing, and optimizer development.
• Independently lead small research projects while collaborating with team members on larger initiatives.
• Design, run, and analyze scientific experiments to advance our understanding of large language models.
• Optimize and scale our training infrastructure to improve efficiency and reliability.
• Develop and improve dev tooling to enhance team productivity.
• Contribute to the entire stack, from low‑level optimizations to high‑level model design.

• Degree (BA required, MS or PhD preferred) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.
• Strong software engineering skills with a proven track record of building complex systems.
• Expertise in Python and deep learning frameworks.
• Experience with high‑performance, large‑scale ML systems, particularly in language modeling.
• Familiarity with ML accelerators, Kubernetes, and large‑scale data processing.
• Strong problem‑solving skills and a results‑oriented mindset.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work in a collaborative environment.

• Have significant software engineering experience.
• Can balance research goals with practical engineering constraints.
• Are willing to take on tasks outside your job description to support the team.
• Enjoy pair programming and collaborative work.
• Are eager to learn more about machine learning research.
• Are enthusiastic about working at an organization that functions as a single, cohesive team pursuing large‑scale AI research projects.
• Have ambitious goals for AI safety and general progress and are excited to create the best outcomes over the long term.

• Optimizing the throughput of novel attention mechanisms.
• Proposing and experimentally comparing Transformer variants.
• Scaling distributed training jobs to thousands of accelerators.
• Designing fault tolerance strategies for training infrastructure.
• Creating interactive visualizations of model internals such as attention patterns.

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. Some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas. We cannot sponsor every role, but if we make an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to secure a visa.

We believe that the highest‑impact AI research comes from big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on a few large‑scale research efforts, valuing impact and advancing our long‑term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI. We view AI research as an empirical science, collaborating frequently to ensure we pursue the highest‑impact work at any given time.

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 collaborative office space. Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.