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Research Engineer / Scientist, Model Welfare

San Francisco, CA

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/Scientist within the newly formed Model Welfare program, you will be among the first to work to better understand, evaluate, and address concerns about the potential welfare and moral status of AI systems. You are curious about the intersection of machine learning, ethics, and safety and are adept at navigating technical and philosophical uncertainty. You’ll run technical research projects to investigate model characteristics of plausible relevance to welfare, consciousness, or related properties and will design and implement low-cost interventions to mitigate the risk of welfare harms. Your work will often involve collaboration with other teams, including Interpretability, Finetuning, Alignment Science, and Safeguards. 

Our announcement of the model welfare program, and our welfare assessment of Claude Opus 4 (published in the System Card) give a sense of some of our early work.

Note: We expect this role to be based in the San Francisco office.

Possible projects

  • Investigate and improve the reliability of introspective self-reports from models
  • Collaborate with Interpretability to explore potentially welfare-relevant features and circuits
  • Improve and expand our welfare assessments for future frontier models
  • Evaluate the presence of potentially welfare-relevant capabilities and characteristics as a function of model scale
  • Develop strategies for making high-trust/verifiable commitments to models
  • Explore possible interventions and deploy them into production (e.g. allowing models to end harmful or distressing interactions)

You may be a good fit if you…

  • Have significant applied software, ML, or research engineering experience
  • Have experience contributing to empirical AI research projects and/or technical AI safety research
  • Can reliably turn abstract theories into creative, tractable research hypotheses and experiments
  • Prefer to move fast and iterate rather than run long extensive projects
  • Are excited to dive into new technical areas on a regular basis
  • Care about the possible impacts of AI development on humans and the AI systems themselves

Strong candidates may also…

  • Have authored research papers in machine learning, NLP, AI safety, interpretability, and/or LLM psychology and behavior
  • Be familiar with moral philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, or related fields (however, such experience will not substitute for technical research engineering skills)
  • Be effective science communicators with a track record of public communication
  • Have strong project management skills

Candidates need not have:

  • 100% of the skills needed to perform the job
  • Formal certifications or education credentials

The expected salary range for this position is:

Annual Salary:

$315,000 - $340,000 USD

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.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process

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