Applied Safety Research Engineer, Safeguards San Francisco, CA

Applied Safety Research Engineer, Safeguards 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.

We are looking for a research-oriented engineer to develop the methods that make our safety evaluations representative, robust, and informative. You'll work on questions like:
How do we measure whether a model is safe? How do we create evaluations that reflect real‑world usage rather than synthetic benchmarks? How do we know our graders are accurate?

This role sits at the intersection of applied ML research and engineering. You'll design experiments to improve how we evaluate model behavior, then ship those methods into pipelines that inform model training and deployment decisions. Your work will directly shape how Anthropic understands and improves the safety of our models across misuse, prompt injection, and user well‑being.

• Design and run experiments to improve evaluation quality—developing methods to generate representative test data, simulate realistic user behavior, and validate grading accuracy.
• Research how different factors (multi‑turn conversations, tools, long context, user diversity) impact model safety behavior.
• Analyze evaluation coverage to identify gaps and inform where we need better measurement.
• Productionize successful research into evaluation pipelines that run during model training, launch and beyond.
• Collaborate with Policy and Enforcement to translate real‑world harm patterns into measurable evaluations.
• Build tooling that enables policy experts to create and iterate on evaluations.
• Surface findings to research and training teams to drive upstream model improvements.

• Have 4+ years of software engineering or ML engineering experience.
• Are proficient in Python and comfortable working across the stack.
• Have experience building and maintaining data pipelines.
• Are comfortable with data analysis and can draw insights from large datasets.
• Have experience with LLMs and understand their capabilities and failure modes.
• Can move fluidly between prototyping and production‑quality code.
• Are excited by ambiguous problems and can translate them into concrete experiments.
• Care deeply about AI safety and want your work to have real impact.

• Red teaming, adversarial testing, or jailbreak research on AI systems.
• Building or contributing to LLM evaluation frameworks or benchmarks.
• Trust and safety, content moderation, or abuse detection systems.
• Synthetic data generation or data augmentation.
• Distributed systems or large‑scale data processing.

The annual compensation range for this role is $320,000 - $405,000 USD. Our total compensation package for full‑time employees includes equity and benefits.

Education requirements:

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

Visa sponsorship:
We sponsor visas. However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. 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.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification.

Your safety matters to us. Remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from  email addresses. Legitimate 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.

As set forth in Anthropic’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected class under any applicable law.