Research Engineer / Scientist, Societal Impacts

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

As a Research Engineer / Scientist on the Societal Impacts team, you'll design and build critical infrastructure that enables and accelerates foundational research into how our AI systems impact people and society. Your work will directly contribute to our research publications, policy campaigns, safety systems, and products.

Our team combines rigorous empirical methods with creative technical approaches. We’re currently grappling with big questions on how AI might impact the future of work, people's wellbeing, education, and more. Additionally, we are continuously studying socio-technical alignment (what values do our systems have?), and evaluating novel AI capabilities as they arise. We develop privacy-preserving tools to measure AI's effects at scale, conduct mixed-methods studies of human-AI interaction, and translate research insights into actionable recommendations for both product and policy.

Strong candidates will have a track record of running & designing experiments relating to machine learning systems, building data processing pipelines, architecting & implementing high-quality internal infrastructure, working in a fast-paced startup environment, navigating the ambiguity inherent to novel empirical research, and demonstrating an eagerness to develop their own research & technical skills. The ideal candidate will enjoy a mixture of running experiments, developing new tools & evaluation suites, working cross-functionally across multiple research and product teams, and striving for beneficial & safe uses for AI.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable technical infrastructure that enables researchers to efficiently run experiments and evaluate AI systems.
• Architect systems that can handle uncertain and changing requirements while maintaining high standards of reliability.
• Lead technical design discussions to ensure our infrastructure can support both current needs and future research directions.
• Partner closely with researchers, data scientists, policy experts, and other cross-functional partners to advance Anthropic’s safety mission.
• Interface with and improve our internal technical infrastructure and tools.
• Generate net-new insights about the potential societal impact of systems being developed by Anthropic.
• Ship changes that help improve our models and products based on the empirical research the Societal Impacts team is conducting.

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience working ambiguous AI research projects.
• Experience building and maintaining production-grade internal tools or research infrastructure.
• Take pride in writing clean, well-documented code in Python that others can build upon.
• Comfortable making technical decisions with incomplete information while maintaining high engineering standards.
• Comfortable getting up-to-speed quickly on unfamiliar codebases, and can work well with other engineers with different backgrounds across the organization.
• Track record of using technical infrastructure to interface effectively with machine learning models.
• Have experience deriving insights from imperfect data streams.
• Experience building systems and products on top of LLMs.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience maintaining large, foundational infrastructure.
• Experience incubating and maturing tooling platforms used by a wide variety of stakeholders.
• Experience building simple interfaces that allow non-technical collaborators to evaluate AI systems.
• Experience working with and prioritizing requests from a wide variety of stakeholders, including research and product teams.
• Experience with distributed systems and designing for scale and reliability.
• Experience scaling and optimizing the performance of tools.
• Experience with product management and/or full-stack product engineering, with a track record of zero-to-one work in startup (or startup-like environments) and owning products end-to-end.
• Research relating to the societal impacts of technology.

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.
• 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.