Research Engineer, Safeguards Labs

Anthropic's mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems that are safe and beneficial for users and society.

The Safeguards Labs team operates at the intersection of research and engineering, investigating novel safety methods to protect Claude and its users.

As a Research Engineer on the Safeguards Labs team, you will define and execute the Labs research agenda, scope your own projects, run experiments end-to-end, and decide when an idea is ready to be handed off to a production team.

Responsibilities:

• 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.

Requirements:

• 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.
• Be 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.
• Be 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.

Strong candidates may also have:

• 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 $350,000-$850,000 USD.

Logistics:

• 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.
• Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas!