Research Engineer, Societal Impacts

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 on the Societal Impacts team, you'll design and build critical infrastructure that enables and accelerates foundational research into how our AI systems impact people and society. Your work will directly contribute to our research publications, policy campaigns, safety systems, and products. 

Our team combines rigorous empirical methods with creative technical approaches. We’re currently grappling with big questions in three key areas on how AI might impact: the economy, people's wellbeing, and education. Additionally, we are continuously studying socio-technical alignment (what values do our systems have?), and evaluating novel AI capabilities as they arise. We develop privacy-preserving tools to measure AI's effects at scale, conduct mixed-methods studies of human-AI interaction, and translate research insights into actionable recommendations for both product and policy.

Strong candidates will have a track record of running & designing experiments relating to machine learning systems, building data processing pipelines, architecting & implementing high-quality internal infrastructure, working in a fast-paced startup environment, navigating the ambiguity inherent to novel empirical research, and demonstrating an eagerness to develop their own research & technical skills. The ideal candidate will enjoy a mixture of running experiments, developing new tools & evaluation suites, working cross-functionally across multiple research and product teams, and striving for beneficial & safe uses for AI.

Note: We are only open to hiring in San Francisco for this team.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement scalable technical infrastructure that enables researchers to efficiently run experiments and evaluate AI systems
• Architect systems that can handle uncertain and changing requirements while maintaining high standards of reliability
• Lead technical design discussions to ensure our infrastructure can support both current needs and future research directions
• Partner closely with researchers, data scientists, policy experts, and other cross-functional partners to advance Anthropic’s safety mission
• Interface with and improve our internal technical infrastructure and tools
• Generate net-new insights about the potential societal impact of systems being developed by Anthropic

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have experience working with Research Scientists on ambiguous AI projects
• Have experience building and maintaining production-grade internal tools or research infrastructure
• Take pride in writing clean, well-documented code in Python that others can build upon
• Are comfortable making technical decisions with incomplete information while maintaining high engineering standards
• Are comfortable getting up-to-speed quickly on unfamiliar codebases
• Have a track record of using technical infrastructure to interface effectively with machine learning models
• Have experience deriving insights from imperfect data streams

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

• Maintaining large, foundational infrastructure
• Building simple interfaces that allow non-technical collaborators to evaluate AI systems
• Working with and prioritizing requests from a wide variety of stakeholders, including research and product teams
• Have experience with distributed systems and can design for scale and reliability
• Scaling and optimizing the performance of tools

Representative Projects:

• Design and implement scalable infrastructure for running large-scale experiments on how people interact with our AI systems (like Clio, the Economic Index,

  Apply for this role

  Generate a tailored application kit with a matched cover letter, interview prep, and CV highlights — in under 60 seconds.

  Apply Now →Generate Application Kit

  Free account required — sign up in 30s

  Report an issue

  Company

  Anthropic

  View company profile →