Software Engineer Research Scientist Jobs in California

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 research teams are pushing the boundaries of AI safety and capability research, and they need exceptional tools to do their best work. As a Software Engineer on the Research Tools team, you'll build the infrastructure and applications that enable our researchers to iterate quickly, run complex experiments, and extract insights from frontier AI systems.
This role sits at the intersection of product thinking and full-stack engineering. You'll work directly with researchers and engineers to deeply understand their workflows, identify bottlenecks, and rapidly ship solutions that multiply their productivity. Whether you're building human feedback interfaces for model evaluation, creating platforms for experiment orchestration, or developing novel visualization tools for understanding model behavior, your work will directly accelerate our mission to build safe, reliable AI systems.
We're looking for someone who can operate with high agency in an ambiguous environment-someone who can be dropped into a research team, quickly develop domain expertise, and independently drive impactful projects from conception to delivery.
No ML or Research experience is required
Responsibilities

• Build and maintain full-stack applications and infrastructure that researchers use daily to conduct experiments, collect feedback, and analyze results
• Partner closely with research teams to understand their workflows, pain points, and requirements, translating these into technical solutions
• Design intuitive interfaces and abstractions that make complex research tasks accessible and efficient
• Create reusable platforms and tools that accelerate the development of new research applications
• Rapidly prototype and iterate on solutions, gathering feedback from users and refining based on real-world usage
• Take ownership of complete product areas, from understanding user needs through design, implementation, and ongoing iteration
• Contribute to technical strategy and architectural decisions for research tooling
• Mentor other engineers and help establish best practices for research application development

You may be a good fit if you

• Have 5+ years of software engineering experience with a strong focus on full-stack development
• Excel at rapid iteration and shipping-you can move from concept to working prototype quickly
• Have experience building tools, platforms, or infrastructure for technical users (engineers, researchers, data scientists, analysts, etc.)
• Demonstrate high agency and ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments
• Can quickly develop deep understanding of complex technical domains
• Have strong product instincts and can identify the right problems to solve
• Are proficient with modern web technologies (React, TypeScript, Python, etc.)
• Have a track record of building user-facing applications that are actually used and loved by their target audience
• Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Care about the societal impacts of your work and are motivated by Anthropic's mission

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience building research tools, scientific software, or experimentation platforms
• Background in machine learning, AI research, or working closely with ML researchers
• Founded or been an early engineer at a startup, particularly one focused on developer or researcher tools
• Built open-source tools or platforms with active user communities
• Experience with data visualization, interactive interfaces, or novel interaction paradigms
• Contributed to engineering platforms or internal tooling at scale (similar to Heroku, Vercel, or other platform-as-a-service products)
• Experience leveraging AI/LLMs to build more powerful or efficient tools
• Previous work in creative tools, artist tools, or other domains requiring deep user empathy
• Domain knowledge in areas like human-computer interaction, systems safety, or AI alignment

Representative projects

• Building interfaces for collecting and managing human feedback on model outputs at scale
• Creating experiment orchestration platforms that make it easy to launch, monitor, and analyze complex research runs
• Developing visualization tools that help researchers understand model behavior and identify failure modes
• Designing reusable components and frameworks that enable rapid development of new research applications
• Building sandboxed execution environments for safely running AI-generated code

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:
$300,000-$405,000 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.