Research Engineer / Scientist, Alignment Science

About Anthropic

Anthropics 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 :

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. Our current topics of focus include...

• Scalable Oversight : Developing techniques to keep highly capable models helpful and honest, even as they surpass human-level intelligence in various domains.
• AI Control : Creating methods to ensure advanced AI systems remain safe and harmless in unfamiliar or adversarial scenarios.
• Alignment Stress-testing : Creatingmodel organisms of misalignment to improve our empirical understanding of how alignment failures might arise.
• Automated Alignment Research : Building and aligning a system that can speed up & improve alignment research.

Representative projects :

You may be a good fit if you :

Strong candidates may also :

Candidates need not have :

The expected salary range for this position is :

$280,000 - $690,000 USD

Logistics

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 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.

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.

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AI Policy for Application

While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree.

In a paragraph or two, why do you want to work on AI safety at Anthropic?

Given your understanding of our teams priorities, what are three projects youd be excited about working on at Anthropic that are aligned with those priorities? (1-2 sentences each)

You can learn about the team's work here :

Share a link to the piece of work you've done that is most relevant to the Alignment Science team, along with a brief description of the work and its relevance.

Whats your ideal breakdown of your time in a working week, in terms of hours or % per week spent on meetings, coding, reading papers, etc.?

In one paragraph, provide an example of something meaningful that you have done in line with your values. Examples could include past work, volunteering, civic engagement, community organizing, donations, family support, etc.

Will you now or will you in the future require employment visa sponsorship to work in the country in which the job you're applying for is located?

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Team Matching

Pre-training The Pre-training team trains large language models that are used by our product, alignment, and interpretability teams. Some projects include figuring out the optimal dataset, architecture, hyper-parameters, and scaling and managing large training runs on our cluster.

AI Alignment Research the Alignment team works to train more aligned (helpful, honest, and harmless) models and does alignment science to understand how alignment techniques work and try to extrapolate to uncover and address new failure modes.

Reinforcement Learning Reinforcement Learning is used by a variety of different teams, both for alignment and to teach models to be more capable at specific tasks.

Platform The Platform team builds shared infrastructure used by Anthropic's research and product teams. Areas of ownership include : the inference service that generates predictions from language models; extensive continuous integration and testing infrastructure; several very large supercomputing clusters and the associated tooling.

Interpretability The Interpretability team investigates whats going on inside large language models in a sense, they are trying to reverse engineer the concepts and mechanics from the inscrutable learned weights of these systems. Their goal is to ensure that AI systems are safe by being able to assess whether theyre doing what we actually want, all the way down to the individual neurons.

Societal Impacts Our Societal Impacts team designs and executes experiments that evaluate the capabilities and harms of the technologies we build. They also support the policy team with empirical evidence.

Product The Product research team trains, evaluates, and improves upon Claude, integrating all of our research techniques to make our AI systems as safe and helpful as possible.

Which teams or projects are you most interested in? (Note : if none of the teams you select are hiring, we won't proceed with your application at this time, although we may reach out if those teams open roles in the future.)

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