Applied AI, Research Engineer
Anthropic · San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY ·
- Category
- AI engineering
- Experience
- 6+ years
- Visa sponsorship
- Yes
- Salary
- USD 300,000 – 400,000 / year
An Applied AI Research Engineer at Anthropic probes new AI models to discover what they can do, builds demos and evals, and enables sales/field teams to deliver them, while going hands-on with strategic customers and feeding field learnings back into Product and Research. Core work centers on LLMs, evals, prototyping, and technical communication.
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.
Applied AI Research Engineer
Applied AI Research Team, Applied AI
About the role:
As an Applied AI Research Engineer, you will discover what Anthropic's models and products can do, prove it with real customers, and equip the rest of Applied AI to sell and deliver it. You'll embed with product teams to build deep expertise on new capabilities as they develop, and serve as a critical feedback loop carrying field reality back to Product and Research so that what we build next reflects what customers actually need.
In collaboration with Sales, Product, and Research teams, you'll sit at the intersection of what we build and how customers adopt it. You'll own the technical<> GTM handshake for model and product launches: testing new models to understand their strengths and limitations, building demos and evals, and helping field teams get ready. When strategic customers hit novel challenges, you'll go hands-on to solve them. And throughout, you'll synthesize what you're learning across customers and products into insights that shape our roadmap, working closely with Product, Engineering, and Research teams to stay calibrated on what's working, what's not, and what matters most.
This role is equal parts researcher, field expert, and connective tissue between our customers and the teams that build our products. You'll need the technical depth to push the boundaries of what our models can do, strong communication skills to make complex capabilities clear to diverse audiences, and the instinct to turn what you learn in the field into signal that makes our products better.
Responsibilities:
- Embed with product teams to build deep technical expertise on new products and capabilities as they develop, becoming the field's go-to expert in your domain
- Own the technical<> GTM handshake for model and product launches-- early testing, field readiness assessments, and ongoing capability education throughout the model lifecycle
- Build demos, evals, and prototypes that showcase customer-relevant model and product capabilities, and define what good performance looks like in important domains
- Develop enablement materials like playbooks, training sessions, and reference architectures in partnership with Technical Enablement, so Applied AI teams can effectively position and deliver new capabilities from day one
- Engage hands-on with strategic customers facing novel technical challenges in your domain, discover solutions, then package learnings into scalable approaches for the broader field
- Synthesize insights from across customer engagements and work with Product and Research to land them. Identify adoption patterns, common blockers, and capability gaps that should inform our research and product roadmaps
- Partner with Sales and Applied AI teams to support high-value accounts that need specialized domain knowledge
- Travel occasionally to customer sites for workshops, implementation support, and research collaboration
You may be a good fit if you have:
- 6+ years of experience as a Software Engineer, Technical Product Manager, Forward Deployed Engineer, AI startup founder, or similar technical role -- ideally with some exposure to customers or end users
- A track record of going deep on technical problems and then translating what you learned into materials, training, or tools that helped others succeed
- Strong technical aptitude with strong proficiency in at least one programming language
- Meaningful experience building with large language models -- whether shipping LLM-powered products, developing agents or workflows, or integrating models into production systems
- Experience designing evals, building prototypes, or developing technical enablement for complex products
- The ability to quickly build domain expertise in new product areas and become a credible technical voice on new topics
- Curiosity about what AI models can actually do -- you enjoy probing the edges of new capabilities and figuring out what use cases just unlocked
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, able to convey complicated topics in easily understandable terms to a diverse set of external and internal stakeholders, including exec-level
- The ability to navigate and execute amidst ambiguity, and to flex into different domains based on the business problem at hand, finding simple, easy-to-understand solutions
- A collaborative, service-oriented mindset – go-to-market at Anthropic is a team sport
- Passion for thinking creatively about how to use technology in a way that is safe and beneficial, and ultimately furthers the goal of advancing safe AI systems
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 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.