[Expression of Interest] Research Manager, Interpretability

Note: we don't have open Research Manager positions on the Interpretability team at this time. However, we're actively growing our team of Research Engineers and Research Scientists. If you're excited about interpretability research and open to an individual contributor role, we encourage you to apply.

About the Interpretability team

When you see what modern language models are capable of, do you wonder, "How do these things work? How can we trust them?"

The Interpretability team’s mission is to reverse engineer how trained models work, and Interpretability research is one of Anthropic’s core research bets on AI safety. We believe that a mechanistic understanding is the most robust way to make advanced systems safe.

People mean many different things by "interpretability". We're focused on mechanistic interpretability, which aims to discover how neural network parameters map to meaningful algorithms. Some useful analogies might be to think of us as trying to do "biology" or "neuroscience" of neural networks, or as treating neural networks as binary computer programs we're trying to "reverse engineer".

We aim to create a solid scientific foundation for mechanistically understanding neural networks and making them safe (see our vision post). We have focused on resolving the issue of "superposition" (see Toy Models of Superposition, Superposition, Memorization, and Double Descent, and our May 2023 update), which causes the computational units of the models, like neurons and attention heads, to be individually uninterpretable, and on finding ways to decompose models into more interpretable components. Our subsequent work which found millions of features in Claude 3.0 Sonnet, one of our production language models, represents progress in this direction. In our most recent work, we developed methods that allow us to build circuits using features and use these circuits to understand the mechanisms associated with a model's computation and study specific examples of multi-hop reasoning, planning, and chain-of-thought faithfulness on Claude Haiku 3.5, one of our production models.” This is a stepping stone towards our overall goal of mechanistically understanding neural networks.

A few places to learn more about our work and team are this introduction to Interpretability from our research lead, Chris Olah, Stanford CS25 lecture given by Josh Batson, and TWIML AI podcast with Emmanuel Ameisen.

Some of our team's notable publications include and our Circuits’ Methods and Biology papers, Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet, Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning, A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits, In-context Learning and Induction Heads, and Toy Models of Superposition. This work builds on ideas from members' work prior to Anthropic such as the original circuits thread, Multimodal Neurons, Activation Atlases, and Building Blocks.

About the role

As a manager on the Interpretability team, you'll support a team of expert researchers and engineers who are trying to understand at a deep, mechanistic level, how modern large language models work internally.

Few things can accelerate this work more than great managers. Your work as manager will be critical in making sure that our fast-growing team is able to meet its ambitious safety research goals over the coming years. In this role, you will partner closely with an individual contributor research lead to drive the team's success, translating cutting-edge research ideas into tangible goals and overseeing their execution. You will manage team execution, careers and performance, facilitate relationships within and across teams, and drive the hiring pipeline.

If you're more interested in making individual direct technical contributions to our research as the primary focus of your role, feel free to apply to our Research Scientist or Research Engineer roles instead.

Key responsibilities

• Partner with a research lead on direction, project planning and execution, hiring, and people development
• Set and maintain a high bar for execution speed and quality, including identifying improvements to processes that help the team operate effectively
• Coach and support team members to have more impact and develop in their careers
• Drive the team's recruiting efforts, including hiring planning, process improvements, and sourcing and closing
• Help identify and support opportunities for collaboration with other teams across Anthropic
• Communicate team updates and results to other teams and leadership
• Maintain a deep understanding of the team's technical work and its implications for AI safety

You may be a good fit if you

• Are an experienced manager (minimum 2-5 years) with a track record of effectively leading highly technical research and/or engineering teams
• Have a background in machine learning, AI, or a related technical field
• Actively enjoy people management and are experienced with coaching and mentorship, performance evaluation, career development, and hiring for technical roles
• Have strong project management skills, including prioritization and cross-functional coordination and collaboration
• Have managed technical teams through periods of ambiguity and change
• Are a quick learner, capable of understanding and contributing to discussions on complex technical topics and are motivated to learn about our research
• Are a strong communicator both in speaking and in writing
• Believe that advanced AI systems could have a transformative effect on the world, and are passionate about helping make sure that transformation goes well

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience scaling engineering infrastructure
• Experience working on open-ended, exploratory research agendas aimed at foundational insights
• Some familiarity with our work and mechanistic interpretability

Role-Specific Location Policy

• This role is expected to be in our SF office for 3 days a week.