Research Engineer, Cybersecurity
About the role
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
The Security team protects Anthropic's AI systems and maintains the trust of our users and society. As a Research Engineer on the team, you'll help safely advance the capabilities of our models in secure coding, vulnerability remediation, and other areas of defensive cybersecurity.
This role blends research and engineering. You'll develop new approaches and build them in code. Your work will include designing and implementing RL environments, running experiments and evaluations, delivering your work into production training runs, and working with researchers, engineers, and cybersecurity specialists both inside and outside Anthropic.
The role asks for domain expertise in cybersecurity paired with interest or experience in training safe AI models. You might be a security researcher curious about how LLMs could change your work, a security engineer interested in how AI could help harden systems at scale, or a detection and response professional wondering how models could improve defensive workflows.
Key responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain RL environments and evaluations that measure and improve model capabilities in secure coding, vulnerability discovery and remediation, and other defensive security tasks
- Run experiments to develop and test new training approaches, and deliver successful results into production training runs
- Partner with researchers, engineers, and security specialists across Anthropic to understand where AI can strengthen defensive workflows, and build toward those needs
- Work with external cybersecurity experts and organizations to ground environments and evaluations in realistic defensive work
- Contribute to the strategic direction of the team, including decisions about what to build, what to partner on, and where to invest
- Participate in an on-call rotation as needed
Minimum qualifications
- Experience in cybersecurity research or applied security work
- Experience with machine learning
- Ability to balance research exploration with engineering implementation
- Care about AI's potential and are committed to developing safe and beneficial systems
Preferred qualifications
- Professional experience in security engineering, fuzzing, detection and response, or other applied defensive work
- Experience participating in or building CTF competitions and cyber ranges
- Academic research experience in cybersecurity
- Familiarity with RL techniques and environments
- Familiarity with LLM training methodologies
Logistics
Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
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. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. 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.
