Staff+ Research Engineer, RL Data Platform
Anthropic · San Francisco, United States +1 · 28d 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
Anthropic's RL Data Platform team builds the systems that produce, move, and serve the human data Claude learns from: the interfaces humans use to give feedback, the pipelines that turn raw feedback into training signal, and the tooling researchers use to launch, monitor, and inspect data collection. Every RL run depends on a steady supply of high-quality data - human feedback, expert demonstrations, graded transcripts - and when a researcher has an idea for new data on Monday, our job is to make it collectable by Wednesday and in the training mix by Friday.
This is a full-stack, ownership-heavy role on a small, senior team. You'll design and ship web interfaces used by thousands of expert annotators, build the backend services and data pipelines behind them, and work directly with RL researchers to understand what data they need and why. You'll scope your own projects, make architectural calls, and see them through to production. We're looking for engineers who treat researchers as their users, build for reliability first, and care as much about the shape of the data leaving the system as the UI going into it.
Key responsibilities
-
Design, build, and operate the feedback and data collection interfaces used by human annotators, domain experts, and internal researchers.
-
Build and maintain the backend services, APIs, and pipelines that route model samples to humans and return structured feedback to training.
-
Own the reliability, latency, and usability of systems that run continuously against live model endpoints.
-
Partner with RL researchers to translate loosely specified data needs into well-scoped collection campaigns and the tooling to run them.
-
Build dashboards, monitoring, and inspection tools so researchers can see data quality and throughput without asking an engineer.
-
Identify and remove the bottlenecks between "we want this data" and "it's in the training mix".
Minimum qualifications
-
Strong full-stack engineering skills, with production experience in TypeScript/React on the frontend and Python on the backend.
-
Experience designing and operating backend services and data pipelines that other teams depend on.
-
A track record of owning projects end-to-end, from an ambiguous brief to something in production that people use.
-
Comfort working directly with technical stakeholders whose needs change week to week, and the judgment to push back when something isn't worth building.
-
Effective use of AI tools in your own day-to-day work.
-
Care about the societal impacts of your work.
Preferred qualifications
-
Experience building annotation, labelling, evaluation, or other human-in-the-loop data tooling.
-
Experience with RLHF, preference data, or other human-feedback pipelines for ML systems.
-
Experience shipping researcher-facing or other expert-facing internal tools people love: interviewing users, hunting down friction, measurably improving the experience.
-
Experience running experiments on data collection interfaces and using the results to improve data quality.
-
Experience working with crowdworker or expert vendor platforms at scale.
-
Familiarity with how LLMs are trained and evaluated.
Representative projects
-
Build an interface that lets a domain expert review a long agentic transcript, flag the step where things went wrong, and write a corrected continuation - with the result landing in a training-ready format.
-
Rework the sampling path between our feedback interfaces and model endpoints to cut time-to-first-sample for annotators.
-
Build a campaign launcher that lets a researcher stand up a new data collection effort (task, rubric, population, quality checks) without writing code.
-
Instrument annotator behaviour to detect low-effort or adversarial work and surface it to the quality team automatically.
-
Design the data model for a kind of feedback we haven't collected before, and ship the pipeline that gets it into the training mix.
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.