Research Engineer, Frontier Red Team (Hardware Lead)
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 Team
The Frontier Red Team (FRT) is a small, focused technical research team within Anthropic's Policy organization. Our goal is to make the entire world safer in this era of advanced AI by understanding what these systems can do and building the defenses that matter.
In 2026, we're focused on researching and ensuring safety with self-improving, highly autonomous AI systems—especially ones with cyberphysical capabilities. See our previous related work on cyberdefense, robotics, and Project Vend. This is early-stage, high-conviction research with the potential for outsized impact.
About the Role
Our belief is that hardware capabilities may come very quickly, be very powerful, and come with enormous benefits and risks. Our team is focused on understanding the shape of this frontier and its implications for AI development. How do we measure these capabilities? How will they emerge and how will models behave? How do we ensure their safety and defend against a world where powerful, autonomous, self-improving AI systems may be used adversarially?
We're looking for a senior engineer or scientist to lead our hardware research efforts—interfacing Claude with robotics and other cyberphysical systems to understand how autonomous AI interacts with the physical world.
This is a senior individual contributor role with the opportunity to grow into team leadership as our hardware research expands. You'll own our hardware research direction, build foundational infrastructure, and shape how Anthropic thinks about cyberphysical AI risks.
This is applied research with real-world stakes. Your work will inform decisions at the highest levels of the company, contribute to public demonstrations that shape policy discourse, and help build technical defenses that could matter enormously as AI systems become more capable.
What You'll Do
- Design and build systems that interface Claude with diverse hardware platforms—robotics and other cyberphysical systems
- Develop some of the first comprehensive evals for hardware-enabled frontier models
- Build training environments for desirable model behavior
- Create demonstrations that characterize cyberphysical capabilities and inform policymakers and the public
- Collaborate with the broader team to integrate hardware capabilities into our defensive AI research
- Work with external experts in robotics, automation, and national security, to scope and validate research directions
- Own the technical roadmap for hardware research within FRT
Sample Projects
- Developing simulation stacks and training pipelines for embodied robotics
- Developing systems where Claude controls diverse hardware and robotics platforms
- Building test environments and evaluations for characterising autonomous AI behavior in physical and simulated settings
- Creating demonstrations of cyberphysical risks and defenses for policy stakeholders
You May Be a Good Fit If You
- Have deep experience with robotics or other cyberphysical systems
- Have strong software engineering skills, particularly in Python
- Have experience building and working with LLM-based agents or autonomous systems
- Are driven to find solutions to ambiguously scoped, high-stakes problems
- Design and run experiments quickly, iterating fast toward useful results
- Thrive in collaborative environments (we love pair programming!)
- Care deeply about AI safety and want your work to have real-world impact on how humanity navigates advanced AI
- Can own entire problems end-to-end, including both technical and non-technical components
- Are comfortable working on sensitive projects that require discretion and integrity
Strong Candidates May Also Have
- Experience leading technical projects or small teams
- Background in controls, mechatronics, or embedded systems
- Experience with simulation environments for robotics or autonomous systems
- Track record of building demos or prototypes that communicate complex technical ideas
- Experience working with external stakeholders (policymakers, government, researchers)
- Familiarity with AI safety research and threat modeling for advanced AI systems
The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.
For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.
Annual Salary:
$850,000 - $850,000 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.
Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.
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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