Explosive Research Chemist Jobs (NOW HIRING)

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 an Enforcement Analyst focused on Chem & Explosives Harms, you will play a critical role in protecting against the misuse of AI systems for chemical and explosives harms. You will enforce our Usage Policy with a specific focus on detecting and mitigating these risks, investigating potential violations, and help continuously strengthen our safeguards. The work sits at the intersection of chemical and explosives threat analysis and platform enforcement: you will read real model interactions and make fast, well-reasoned calls about whether activity is benign research or a credible attempt at harm.
This role is a fit for someone who understands the dual-use nature of chemistry and explosives technologies well enough to separate the benign from the malicious - and who acts decisively under ambiguity. You will own and continuously improve the enforcement monitoring workflows for this harm area, and you will work closely with Policy, Threat Intelligence, Data Science, and Engineering matrix partners to accomplish tasks at scale. Safety is core to our mission, and your work will directly protect individuals, communities, and critical systems from AI-facilitated weapons harm.
Important context for the role: In this position you may be exposed to and engage with explicit content spanning a range of topics, including material of a sexual, violent, or psychologically disturbing nature. The role also carries a shared on-call responsibility across the Policy and Enforcement teams.
Key responsibilities

• Enforce Usage Policies with a specific focus on detecting and mitigating potential chemical and explosives risks and harmful use of AI systems.
• Take ownership of enforcement monitoring workflows for the chemical and explosives harm area, improving end-to-end detection, investigation, triage, and escalation processes.
• Monitor and analyze platform activity to identify emerging patterns related to chemical and explosives threats (within the broader CBRNE landscape) that may require policy updates or enforcement action.
• Design and architect automated enforcement systems and review workflows that scale effectively while maintaining high accuracy across a technically complex content surface.
• Conduct thorough investigations of potential violations, gathering and documenting evidence to support enforcement decisions.
• Proactively surface trends and propose improvements to detection methods and review workflows without waiting to be directed.
• Partner with Engineering and Data Science teams to optimize detection models and automated enforcement systems for policy violations.
• Partner with Policy and Threat Intelligence teams to understand potential exploits and contribute to risk-assessment frameworks, and partner with engineers iterating on safety systems.
• Provide enforcement-grounded feedback on policy gaps, and handle escalations and time-sensitive situations related to chemical and explosives policy violations.

Minimum qualifications

• Hold a degree in a chemistry-related field (e.g., chemistry, chemical engineering, materials science) and/or relevant professional experience in a related field.
• Possess experience in Trust & Safety, content moderation, or policy enforcement at platform scale, including working with generative AI tools to refine and optimize content review and enforcement workflows.
• Possess experience in utilizing AI tools to develop data dashboards for metrics collection in support of continuous improvement efforts.
• Can analyze complex, ambiguous situations and make well-reasoned, defensible decisions under time pressure.
• Are proactive and self-directed: you spot trends, dig in, and ship improvements on your own initiative.
• Communicate clearly in writing and can translate technical chemistry concepts for diverse audiences, including both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred qualifications

• Subject matter expertise in chemical and explosives defense, security, WMD/CBRNE non-proliferation, or threat-intelligence.
• An understanding of where real-world chemical and explosives risk actually lies - adversary intent, acquisition and weaponization pathways, and dual-use concerns, including familiarity with cross-platform threat analysis and open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques relevant to weapons of mass destruction.
• Proficiency in SQL and/or other data analysis tools to draw insights from large datasets and monitor enforcement workflow health.
• Familiarity with the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), scheduled chemicals, precursor controls, and energetic-materials safety frameworks.

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.
Annual Salary:
$245,000-$285,000 USD
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.