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Research Scientist/Engineer, Biological Safety

Anthropic· Safeguards (Trust & Safety)
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Hybrid (San Francisco, CA)$300k - $405kFull-timePosted 9mo ago

About the role

Bio safety research role at Anthropic focused on building safety and oversight mechanisms for biological knowledge in models, including evaluations, data curation, classifier development, and production robustness with emphasis on precision and balancing safeguards with legitimate research use.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and run capability evaluations to assess what new models can do in the biological domain, and turn results into concrete deployment recommendations
  • Develop training and evaluation datasets for our safety classifiers, working with internal and external threat modeling experts to ground them in realistic risk
  • Train, tune, and iterate on safety classifiers with ML engineers, optimizing jointly for adversarial robustness and low false-positive rates
  • Build the tooling and pipelines that make evaluation and classifier development fast and repeatable
  • Analyze classifier and eval performance against production traffic, identify gaps, and prioritize improvements
  • Design and run red-teaming and stress-testing of safeguards as threats, models, and product surfaces evolve
  • Partner with Research, Product, and Policy teams to embed biological safety throughout the model development lifecycle
  • Contribute to external communications including model cards, blog posts, and policy documents
  • Track developments in biology, ML, and biosecurity for their potential to create new risks or enable new mitigations

Qualifications

  • Strong proficiency in Python, and extensive background in scientific programming and data analysis skills
  • Excellent grasp of ML fundamentals and an ability to rapidly adopt ML development practices
  • Excellent knowledge of modern biology across both measurement and engineering: high-throughput assays and functional characterization, as well as gene synthesis, genome editing, strain construction, and protein engineering
  • Ability to build and maintain your own tooling rather than relying on others to implement your ideas
  • Experience designing quantitative experiments or evaluations and drawing defensible conclusions from noisy results
  • Strong analytical and writing skills, and the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
  • Familiarity with dual-use research concerns and biosecurity frameworks, such as select agent regulations, the Biological Weapons Convention, or Australia Group guidelines
  • Comfort with ambiguity and with shifting priorities as AI capabilities change
  • 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

Skills

Required:PythonML fundamentalsBiology knowledgeData analysisCommunicationBiosecurity familiarityTooling development

Benefits

  • Competitive compensation and benefits
  • Generous vacation and parental leave
  • Flexible working hours
  • Optionally equity donation matching
  • Lovely office space in San Francisco
Last updated Jul 22, 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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