Research Engineer, Universes

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 Team

The Universes team within Research is responsible for training AI models to perform complex, difficult, long-horizon agentic tasks in ultra-realistic settings. We design and implement novel training environments that go far beyond what models can do today — environments where models learn to navigate ambiguity, handle interruptions, maintain context over extended interactions, and exercise judgment in open-ended scenarios.

About the Role

We're looking for Research Engineers to help us build the next generation of training environments for capable and safe agentic AI.

This role blends research and engineering responsibilities, requiring you to both implement novel approaches and contribute to research direction. You'll work on fundamental research in reinforcement learning, designing training environments and methodologies that push the state of the art, and building evaluations that measure genuine capability.

Responsibilities:

• Build the next generation of agentic environments

• Build rigorous evaluations that measure real capability

• Collaborate across research and infrastructure teams to ship environments into production training

• Debug and iterate rapidly across research and production ML stacks

• Contribute to research culture through technical discussions and collaborative problem-solving

You may be a good fit if you:

• Are highly impact-driven — you care about outcomes, not activity

• Operate with high agency

• Have good research taste or senior technical experience, demonstrating good judgment in identifying what actually matters in complex problem spaces

• Can balance research exploration with engineering implementation

• Are passionate about the potential impact of AI and are committed to developing safe and beneficial systems

• Are comfortable with uncertainty and adapt quickly as the landscape shifts

• Have strong software engineering skills and can build robust infrastructure

• Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)

Strong candidates may also have one or more of the following:

• Have industry experience with large language model training, fine-tuning or evaluation

• Have industry experience building RL environments, simulation systems, or large-scale ML infrastructure

• Senior experience in a relevant technical field even if transitioning domains

• Deep expertise in sandboxing, containerization, VM infrastructure, or distributed systems

• Published influential work in relevant ML areas

The annual compensation range for this role is 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. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity and benefits.

Annual Salary:$500,000—$850,000 USD

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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. 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