Description
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.
About the Role
As a Research Engineer within Reinforcement Learning, you will collaborate with a diverse group of researchers and engineers to advance the capabilities and safety of large language models. This role blends research and engineering responsibilities, requiring you to both implement novel approaches and contribute to the research direction. You'll work on fundamental research in reinforcement learning, creating 'agentic' models via tool use for open-ended tasks such as computer use and autonomous software generation, improving reasoning abilities in areas such as mathematics, and developing prototypes for internal use, productivity, and evaluation.
Representative projects:
- Architect and optimize core reinforcement learning infrastructure, from clean training abstractions to distributed experiment management across GPU clusters. Help scale our systems to handle increasingly complex research workflows.
- Design, implement, and test novel training environments, evaluations, and methodologies for reinforcement learning agents which push the state of the art for the next generation of models.
- Drive performance improvements across our stack through profiling, optimization, and benchmarking. Implement efficient caching solutions and debug distributed systems to accelerate both training and evaluation workflows.
- Collaborate across research and engineering teams to develop automated testing frameworks, design clean APIs, and build scalable infrastructure that accelerates AI research.
You may be a good fit if you:
- Are proficient in Python and async/concurrent programming with frameworks like Trio
- Have experience with machine learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX)
- Have industry experience in machine learning research
- Can balance research exploration with engineering implementation
- Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
- Care about code quality, testing, and performance
- Have strong systems design and communication skills
- Are passionate about the potential impact of AI and are committed to developing safe and beneficial systems
Strong candidates may have:
- Familiarity with LLM architectures and training methodologies
- Experience with reinforcement learning techniques and environments
- Experience with virtualization and sandboxed code execution environments
- Experience with Kubernetes
- Experience with distributed systems or high-performance computing
- Experience with Rust and/or C++
Strong candidates need not have:
- Formal certifications or education credentials
- Academic research experience or publication history
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. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.
Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential