Machine Learning Systems Engineer, Research Tools

We are seeking an experienced Machine Learning Systems Engineer to join our Encodings and Tokenization team at Anthropic. This cross-functional role will be instrumental in developing and optimizing the encodings and tokenization systems used throughout our Finetuning workflows. As a bridge between our Pretraining and Finetuning teams, you'll build critical infrastructure that directly impacts how our models learn from and interpret data.

Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain tokenization systems used across Pretraining and Finetuning workflows
• Optimize encoding techniques to improve model training efficiency and performance
• Collaborate closely with research teams to understand their evolving needs around data representation
• Build infrastructure that enables researchers to experiment with novel tokenization approaches
• Implement systems for monitoring and debugging tokenization-related issues in the model training pipeline
• Create robust testing frameworks to validate tokenization systems across diverse languages and data types
• Identify and address bottlenecks in data processing pipelines related to tokenization
• Document systems thoroughly and communicate technical decisions clearly to stakeholders across teams

You May Be a Good Fit If You:

• Have significant software engineering experience with demonstrated machine learning expertise
• Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and developing solutions in rapidly evolving research environments
• Can work independently while maintaining strong collaboration with cross-functional teams
• Are results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
• Have experience with machine learning systems, data pipelines, or ML infrastructure
• Are proficient in Python and familiar with modern ML development practices
• Have strong analytical skills and can evaluate the impact of engineering changes on research outcomes
• Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
• Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
• Care about the societal impacts of your work and are committed to developing AI responsibly

Strong Candidates May Also Have Experience With:

• Working with machine learning data processing pipelines
• Building or optimizing data encodings for ML applications
• Implementing or working with BPE, WordPiece, or other tokenization algorithms
• Performance optimization of ML data processing systems
• Multi-language tokenization challenges and solutions
• Research environments where engineering directly enables scientific progress
• Distributed systems and parallel computing for ML workflows
• Large language models or other transformer-based architectures (not required)

The annual compensation range for this role is $320,000-$405,000 USD.