Research Engineer, Knowledge Team

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 are looking for Research Engineers to help us redesign how Claude interacts with external data sources. Many of the paradigms for how data and knowledge bases are organized assume human consumers and constraints. This is no longer true in a world of LLMs! Your job will be to design new architectures for how information is organized, and train language models to optimally use those architectures.

Responsibilities:

• Designing and implementing from scratch new information architecture strategies
• Performing finetuning and reinforcement learning to teach language models how to interact with new information architectures
• Building "hard" knowledge base eval sets to help identify failure modes of how language models work with external data
• Designing and evaluating advanced agentic search capabilities.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Are a very experienced Python programmer who can quickly produce reliable, high quality code that your teammates love using
• Have good machine learning research experience
• Have experience developing software that utilizes Large Language Models such as Claude
• Are results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
• Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
• Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
• Want to partner with world-class ML researchers to develop new LLM capabilities
• Care about the societal impacts of your work
• Have clear written and verbal communication

Strong candidates will also have experience with:

• Collaborating with product teams to quickly prototype and deliver innovative solutions
• Building complex agentic systems that utilize LLMs
• Developing scalable distributed information retrieval systems, such as search engines, knowledge graphs, RAG, indexing, ranking, query understanding, and distributed data processing

The expected salary range for this position is: Annual Salary: £250,000-£340,000 GBP.

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.