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Research Engineer, Interpretability

Anthropic· AI Research & Engineering
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San Francisco, CA$315k - $560kfull-timePosted 11mo ago

About the role

Research Engineer role within Anthropic's Interpretability team focused on reverse-engineering how trained models work to build robust, safe AI systems. Involves building specialized infrastructure for interpretability research, driving production-ready tooling, and collaborating with researchers to apply interpretability insights to safety audits and model deployment.

Responsibilities

  • Build and maintain the specialized inference and training infrastructure that powers interpretability research - including instrumented forward/backward passes, activation extraction, and steering vector application
  • Resolve scaling and efficiency bottlenecks through profiling, optimization, and close collaboration with peer infrastructure teams
  • Design tools, abstractions, and platforms that enable researchers to rapidly experiment without hitting engineering barriers
  • Help bring interpretability research into production safety audits - with real deadlines and high reliability expectations
  • Work across the stack - from model internals and accelerator-level optimization to user-facing research tooling

Qualifications

  • Have 5-10+ years of experience building software
  • Are highly proficient in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Rust, Go, Java) and productive with Python
  • Are extremely curious about unfamiliar domains; can quickly learn and put that knowledge to work, e.g. diving into new layers of the stack to find bottlenecks
  • Have a strong ability to prioritize the most impactful work and are comfortable operating with ambiguity and questioning assumptions
  • Prefer fast-moving collaborative projects to extensive solo efforts
  • Are curious about interpretability research and its role in AI safety (though no research experience is required!)
  • Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work
  • Are comfortable working closely with researchers, translating research needs into engineering solutions.

Skills

Required:ProgrammingSoftware infrastructureCollaborative research tooling
Nice to have:System profiling and optimization

Benefits

  • Competitive compensation
  • Optional equity donation matching
  • Generous vacation and parental leave
  • Flexible working hours
  • Lovely office space
Last updated Jul 8, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Anthropic

building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

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