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Research Scientist, Life Sciences

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

We're seeking an exceptional Research Scientist to join our pioneering Life Sciences team at Anthropic. Our team is building a world-class research group focused on making fundamental biological discoveries. This role combines cutting-edge AI with hands-on biological research, positioning Anthropic at the forefront of AI-accelerated scientific discovery.

As a founding member of Life Sciences, you'll work in a high-impact team that operates at the intersection of computational and experimental biology. You'll help establish Anthropic as a leader in biology research while developing product intuition through direct engagement with the challenges and opportunities of laboratory science.

Responsibilities:

  • Implement a scientific research program that may include both wet-lab and computational components
  • Design and implement evaluation methodologies for assessing AI model capabilities relevant to biological research and applications
  • Develop and execute strategies to systematically improve model performance on scientific tasks
  • Develop approaches to address long-horizon task completion and complex reasoning challenges essential for scientific discovery
  • Translate between biological domain knowledge and machine learning objectives

You May Be a Good Fit If You:

  • Have at least 8 years of hands-on experience in life sciences R&D, with deep expertise in areas such as molecular biology, drug discovery, or computational biology
  • Have a track record of bridging biological domain knowledge with computational approaches to solve real scientific problems
  • Basic proficiency in Python and familiar with ML development practices
  • 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
  • Thrive in a fast-paced research environment where you balance rigorous scientific standards with rapid iteration
  • Are passionate about using AI to accelerate scientific discovery while maintaining high ethical standards

Strong Candidates May Also Have:

  • Ph.D. in a biological science (molecular biology, biochemistry, bioengineering, computational biology), or in a related field, or equivalent industry experience
  • Published research or practical experience in scientific AI applications
  • Familiarity with modern machine learning techniques and model training methodologies
  • Familiarity with biological databases (UniProt, GenBank, PDB) and computational biology tools

This role offers a unique opportunity to shape how AI transforms biological research. You'll work with some of the world's best AI researchers while tackling problems that matter deeply for human health and scientific understanding. If you're excited about using your expertise to make fundamental biological discoveries and guide the development of transformative AI systems, we want to hear from you.

Role-specific policy: For this role, we expect staff to be able to work from our San Francisco office at least 3 days a week, though we encourage you to apply even if you might need some flexibility for an interim period of time.

The expected base compensation for this position is below. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation.

Annual Salary:

$300,000 - $320,000 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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