Research Engineer, Model Evaluations
Anthropic · San Francisco, United States +1 · 5mo ago
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.
About the role
We're looking for Research Engineers to build the evaluations that tell us — and the world — what Claude can actually do. Your work will turn ambiguous notions of "intelligence" into clear, defensible metrics that researchers, leadership, and the public can rely on.
You'll design and implement evaluations across the full spectrum of Claude's capabilities and personality, and build the infrastructure that runs them reliably at scale. You'll partner closely with researchers throughout the lifecycle of a new capability — from defining what to measure, to running the eval against live training checkpoints, to interpreting the results. The goal is to make Anthropic the leader in extremely well-characterized AI systems, with performance that is exhaustively measured and validated across the tasks that matter.
Key responsibilities
- Design and run new evaluations of Claude's capabilities — reasoning, agentic behavior, knowledge, safety properties — and produce visualizations that make the results legible to researchers and decision-makers
- Build and harden the distributed eval execution platform so hundreds of evals run reliably against checkpoints throughout production RL training runs
- Own the dashboards researchers and leadership use to monitor model health during training, improving signal-to-noise, reducing latency, and making regressions impossible to miss
- Debug anomalous eval results mid-training-run, determine whether the cause is a model change or an infrastructure issue, and communicate the answer clearly under time pressure
- Improve the tooling, libraries, and workflows researchers use to implement and iterate on evaluations
- Partner with research teams across the full lifecycle of a new capability — from defining what to measure to interpreting results as training progresses
- Run experiments to characterize how prompting, sampling, and scaffolding choices affect results on internal and industry benchmarks
- Communicate evaluations and their results to internal stakeholders and, where appropriate, external audiences
Minimum qualifications
- Strong Python programming skills, including production or research infrastructure
- Experience building or operating distributed systems, data pipelines, or other infrastructure that needs to be reliable at scale
- Clear written and verbal communication, especially when explaining technical results to non-specialists
- Comfort operating in an on-call or production-support capacity when training runs are live
- Care about the societal impacts of your work and an interest in steering powerful AI to be safe and beneficial
Preferred qualifications
- Hands-on experience using large language models such as Claude, including prompting, sampling, and scaffolding
- Background in data visualization and a track record of building dashboards people actually trust and use
- Experience developing robust evaluation metrics for language models
- Experience with observability, monitoring, or experiment-tracking systems
- Background in statistics and experimental design
- Experience with large-scale dataset sourcing, curation, and processing
- Experience running or supporting ML training infrastructure
- A bias toward picking up slack and operating flexibly across team boundaries
- Enjoy pair programming — we love to pair
Representative projects
- Stand up a new eval that tests a specific reasoning capability from scratch — define the task, build the dataset, implement the scoring, validate against known signals, and ship a dashboard that makes the result legible
- Diagnose a mid-training regression: an eval suite returns anomalous numbers, and you need to determine within hours whether it's the model, the harness, the data, or the infrastructure
- Take a flaky distributed eval pipeline and make it boring — better retries, better observability, faster feedback to researchers
- Partner with a research team on a new capability area, helping them articulate what "good" looks like and translating that into measurable artifacts
The annual compensation range for this role is listed 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.
Logistics
Minimum education: Bachelor’s 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 aren't 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 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.
Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In 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 you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.
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.
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 about our policy for using AI in our application process.