Research Engineer; Safeguards Labs

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems, aiming for safety and benefit to users and society.

Safeguards Labs is a new team at the intersection of research and engineering, investigating safety methods to protect Claude and its users. We prototype approaches to safe models, usage safeguards, and production safety, testing ideas offline before deploying them to partner Safeguards teams. Our work overlaps closely with account abuse, model behavior safeguards, and other safeguard subteams.

We are hiring research engineers to define and execute the Labs research agenda. You will scope projects, run experiments end‑to‑end, and decide when an idea is ready for handoff to a production team or when to pivot.

• Lead and contribute to research projects investigating new methods for detecting misuse of Claude, identifying malicious organizations and accounts, strengthening model safeguards, and addressing 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 prototypes that could supply signals to the real‑time safeguards path, partnering with engineers on tech transfer.
• Contribute to a broader research portfolio on detecting abusive behavior in chat‑based or agentive workflows, and for training the model to robustly refrain from dangerous responses without over‑refusing.
• Build evaluations and methodologies for measuring whether safeguards 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.

Annual compensation range: $350,000 – $850,000 USD.

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent.

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role.

Minimum years of experience: Correlates with internal job level requirements.

Location-based hybrid policy: All staff expected to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time.

Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas where possible.

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