Research Scientist, RSP Evaluations (Autonomy) 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 We are looking for Research Scientists to lead advanced autonomy evaluation on our Frontier Red Team. Our goal is to develop and implement a gold standard of advanced autonomy evals to determine the AI Safety Level (ASL) of our models. This will have major implications for the way we train, deploy, and secure our models, as detailed in our Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) .
We believe that developing autonomy evals is one of the best ways to study increasingly capable and agentic models. If you've thought particularly hard about how models might be agentic and associated risks, and you've built an eval or experiment around it, we'd like to meet you.
Please note:
- We will be prioritizing candidates who can start ASAP and can be based in either our San Francisco or London office.
- We're still iterating on the structure of our team. It is possible that this role might end up being the people manager of a few other individual contributors (ICs). If you would be interested in people management, you may express interest in the application.
Responsibilities: - Lead the end-to-end development of autonomy evals and research. This starts with risk and capability modeling, and includes designing, implementing, and regularly running these evals.
- Quickly iterate on experiments to evaluate autonomous capabilities and forecast future capabilities.
- Provide technical leadership to Research Engineers to scope + build scalable and secure infrastructure to quickly run large-scale experiments.
- Communicate the outcomes of the evaluations to relevant Anthropic teams, as well as policy stakeholders and research collaborators, where relevant.
- Collaborate with other projects on the Frontier Red Team, Alignment, and beyond to improve infrastructure and design safety techniques for autonomous capabilities
You may be a good fit if you: - Have and ML background and experience leading experimental research on LLMs/multimodal models and/or agents
- Have strong Python-based engineering skills
- Are driven to find solutions to ambiguously scoped problems
- Design and run experiments and iterate quickly to solve machine learning problems
- Thrive in a collaborative environment (we love pair programming)
- Have experience training, working with, and prompting models
The expected salary range for this position is:
$320,000 - $485,000 USD
Logistics 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.
US visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas. However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate; operations roles are especially difficult to support. But if we make you an offer, we will make every effort to get you into the United States, 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.
Compensation and Benefits Anthropic's compensation package consists of three elements: salary, equity, and benefits. We are committed to pay fairness and aim for these three elements collectively to be highly competitive with market rates.
Equity - On top of this position's salary (listed above), equity will be a major component of the total compensation. We aim to offer higher-than-average equity compensation for a company of our size, and communicate equity amounts at the time of offer issuance.
US Benefits - The following benefits are for our US-based employees:
- Optional equity donation matching at a 3:1 ratio, up to 50% of your equity grant.
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and all your dependents.
- 401(k) plan with 4% matching.
- 22 weeks of paid parental leave.
- Unlimited PTO - most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more.
- Stipends for education, home office improvements, commuting, and wellness.
- Fertility benefits via Carrot.
- Daily lunches and snacks in our office.
- Relocation support for those moving to the Bay Area.
UK Benefits - The following benefits are for our UK-based employees:
- Optional equity donation matching at a 3:1 ratio, up to 50% of your equity grant.
- Private health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents.
- Pension contribution (matching 4% of your salary).
- 21 weeks of paid parental leave.
- Unlimited PTO - most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more.
- Health cash plan.
- Life insurance and income protection.
- Daily lunches and snacks in our office.
This compensation and benefits information is based on Anthropic's good faith estimate for this position as of the date of publication and may be modified in the future. Employees based outside of the UK or US will receive a different benefits package. The level of pay within the range will depend on a variety of job-related factors, including where you place on our internal performance ladders, which is based on factors including past work experience, relevant education, and performance on our interviews or in a work trial. 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. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both as needed.
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 based 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.
Are you open to working in-person at our office several days a week?
Of the locations listed on the job posting, which one are you most interested in working from for your 25% time in-person?
San Francisco, CA
Seattle, WA
New York, NY
London, UK
If you're not already based in one of our hub cities, are you willing to relocate?
Yes, to the San Francisco Bay Area
Yes, to Seattle
Yes, to New York City
Yes, to London
No. I am open to hybrid roles, but not roles that require relocation.
I already live in one of your hub cities.
When is the earliest you would want to start working with us?
Do you have any deadlines or timeline considerations we should be aware of?
AI Policy for Application
While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree. Why do you want to work at Anthropic? (We value this response highly - great answers are often 200-400 words.)
Which of the following workstreams are you interested in:
Will you now or in the future require visa sponsorship for employment at Anthropic?
Are you legally authorized to work in the country in which the job you are applying for is located?
Add a cover letter or anything else you want to share.
LinkedIn Profile
Please ensure to provide
either your LinkedIn profile or Resume, we require at least one of the two.
Voluntary Self-Identification For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey . click apply for full job details