Research Engineer, Pretraining

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.

Key Responsibilities:

• Conduct research and implement solutions in areas such as model architecture, algorithms, data processing, and optimizer development

• Independently lead small research projects while collaborating with team members on larger initiatives

• Design, run, and analyse scientific experiments to advance our understanding of large language models

• Optimise and scale our training infrastructure to improve efficiency and reliability

• Develop and improve dev tooling to enhance team productivity

• Contribute to the entire stack, from low-level optimisations to high-level model design

Qualifications:

• Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field

• Strong software engineering skills with a proven track record of building complex systems

• Expertise in Python and experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch preferred)

• Familiarity with large-scale machine learning, particularly in the context of language models

• Ability to balance research goals with practical engineering constraints

• Strong problem-solving skills and a results-oriented mindset

• Excellent communication skills and ability to work in a collaborative environment

• Care about the societal impacts of your work

Preferred Experience:

• Work on high-performance, large-scale ML systems

• Familiarity with GPUs, Kubernetes, and OS internals

• Experience with language modelling using transformer architectures

• Knowledge of reinforcement learning techniques

• Background in large-scale ETL processes

You'll thrive in this role if you:

• Have significant software engineering experience

• Are results-oriented with a bias towards flexibility and impact

• Willingly take on tasks outside your job description to support the team

• Enjoy pair programming and collaborative work

• Are eager to learn more about machine learning research

• Are enthusiastic to work at an organisation that functions as a single, cohesive team pursuing large-scale AI research projects

• Are working to align state of the art models with human values and preferences, understand and interpret deep neural networks, or develop new models to support these areas of research

• View research and engineering as two sides of the same coin, and seek to understand all aspects of our research program as well as possible, to maximise the impact of your insights

• Have ambitious goals for AI safety and general progress in the next few years, and you’re working to create the best outcomes over the long-term.

Sample Projects:

• Optimising the throughput of novel attention mechanisms

• Comparing compute efficiency of different Transformer variants

• Preparing large-scale datasets for efficient model consumption

• Scaling distributed training jobs to thousands of GPUs

• Designing fault tolerance strategies for our training infrastructure

• Creating interactive visualisations of model internals, such as attention patterns

Benefits:

At Anthropic, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We strongly encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds, including those from underrepresented groups in tech.

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.

• Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from https://job-boards.greenhouse.io.