Research Engineer, Safeguards Labs

Research Engineer

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.

• Lead and contribute to research projects investigating new methods for detecting misuse of Claude, identifying malicious organizations and accounts, strengthening model safeguards, and other safety needs.
• Design and run offline analyses over model usage data to surface abuse patterns, build classifiers and detection systems, and evaluate their effectiveness.
• Develop and iterate on prototypes that could eventually feed signals into the real-time safeguards path, partnering with engineers on tech transfer.
• Contribute to a broader research portfolio investigating methods for detecting abusive behavior in chat-based or agentive workflows, and for training the model to robustly refrain from dangerous responses or behaviors without over-refusing.
• Build evaluations and methodologies for measuring whether safeguards actually work, including in agentic settings.
• Write up findings clearly so they inform decisions across Trust & Safety, research, and product teams.

• Have a track record of independently driving research projects from ambiguous problem statements to concrete results, ideally in AI, ML, security, integrity, or a related technical field.
• Are comfortable scoping your own work and switching between research, engineering, and analysis as a project demands.
• Have working familiarity with how large language models operate — sampling, prompting, training — even if LLMs aren't your primary background.
• Are proficient in Python and comfortable working with large datasets.
• Care about the societal impacts of AI and want your work to directly reduce real-world harm.

• Experience building and training machine learning models, including classifiers for abuse, fraud, integrity, or security applications.
• Knowledge of evaluation methodologies for language models and experience designing evals.
• Experience with agentic environments and evaluating model behavior in them.
• Background in trust and safety, integrity, fraud detection, threat intelligence, or adversarial ML.
• Experience with red teaming, jailbreak research, or interpretability methods like steering vectors.
• A history of taking research prototypes and transferring them into production systems.

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

Annual Salary: $350,000 —$850,000 USD

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…