Staff+ Software Engineer, Safeguards
Anthropic · San Francisco, United States +1 · 11mo 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 are looking for software engineers to help build safety and oversight mechanisms for our AI systems. As a software engineer on the Safeguards team, you will work to monitor models, prevent misuse, and ensure user well-being. This role will focus on building systems to detect unwanted model behaviors and prevent disallowed use of models. You will apply your technical skills to uphold our principles of safety, transparency, and oversight while enforcing our terms of service and acceptable use policies.
We have multiple teams that are currently hiring within Safeguards. Team placement occurs after the interview process, taking into account your interests and experience alongside organizational needs. This flexible approach allows us to match talented engineers where they'll have the greatest impact and growth potential.
Safeguards Acceleration: Builds the agentic systems that let Anthropic's trust & safety teams work at the speed of the models they're protecting. Our flagship project extends Claude Tag, Anthropic's agentic AI collaborator, so it can safely operate on the sensitive data at the heart of Safeguards work: investigating abuse, calibrating detection systems, and closing the loop from signal to enforcement. The hard part isn't making the agent capable, it's making it safe. We develop sandboxed agent architectures, brokered and audited data access, and provenance guarantees that keep humans firmly in control as model capabilities grow. You'll work at the intersection of agent security, privacy engineering, and safeguards infrastructure, on problems that get more important with every model release.
Safeguards Interventions: Responsible for what happens when a safety system fires. You'll own the composable arsenal of intervention options that sit between our detection stack (classifiers and probes) and the user, across every Anthropic surface: 1P products, the API, and third-party clouds. This includes inline interventions for areas like harmful bio, cyber, and acceptable usage as well as downstream areas like child safety and copyright. You'll build sync and async systems that operate at Anthropic scale, touching every request, and ensuring that we evolve and drive the quality, scale and systems of our interventions to enable our products to grow safely.
Safeguards Data Intelligence: Builds the systems that catch what everything else misses. Our Claude Investigation tool, an autonomous Claude-powered agent that reasons across tens of billions of stored interactions to surface cyberattacks, weapons development, and state-sponsored influence operations; thousands of copies run in parallel, which is how a small team covers the whole surface. The hard part isn't finding signal, it's finding it at this scale, under real deadlines, on threats that are actively adapting to us. You'll do serious distributed-systems and data-infrastructure work — running an agent fleet across three clouds, building batch inference, summarization, and search infrastructure — against threats that are happening today, not hypotheticals.
Responsibilities:
- Develop monitoring systems to detect unwanted behaviors from our API partners and potentially take automated enforcement actions; surface these in internal dashboards to analysts for manual review
- Build abuse detection mechanisms and infrastructure
- Surface abuse patterns to our research teams to harden models at the training stage
- Build robust and reliable multi-layered defenses for real-time improvement of safety mechanisms that work at scale
You may be a good fit if you:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or comparable experience
- Proficiency in Python and Typescript
- Ability to work across the stack
- Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
Strong candidates may also:
- 8+ years of experience in a software engineering position
- Have experience with integrity, spam, fraud, or abuse detection and mitigation
- Have experience building trust and safety detection mechanisms and intervention for AI/ML systems
- Have experience with prompt engineering, jailbreak attacks, and other adversarial inputs
- Have worked closely with operational teams to build custom internal tooling
Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
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.