Research Engineer, Knowledge Bases

We are looking for Research Engineers to help us redesign how Language Models interact 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 Language Models! 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
• Extending traditional ideas like RAG into heterogeneous data types (image, tables, relational data, etc.)

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have significant Python programming experience
• 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:

• Developing scalable distributed information retrieval systems, such as search engines, knowledge graphs, indexing, ranking, query understanding, and distributed data processing
• Conducting research to advance search quality and knowledge base systems
• Understanding Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and its limitations
• Collaborating with product teams to quickly prototype and deliver innovative solutions

The expected salary range for this position is: Annual Salary: $280,000—$485,000 USD

Logistics

• 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.
• US visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate; operations roles are especially difficult to support. But if we make you an offer, we will make every effort to get you into the United States, 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.

Compensation and Benefits

Anthropic’s compensation package consists of three elements: salary, equity, and benefits. We are committed to pay fairness and aim for these three elements collectively to be highly competitive with market rates.

Equity - For eligible roles, equity will be a major component of the total compensation. We aim to offer higher-than-average equity compensation for a company of our size, and communicate equity amounts at the time of offer issuance.

US Benefits - The following benefits are for our US-based employees:

• Optional equity donation matching.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and all your dependents.
• 401(k) plan with 4% matching.
• 22 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Unlimited PTO – most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more!
• Stipends for education, home office improvements, commuting, and wellness.
• Fertility benefits via Carrot.
• Daily lunches and snacks in our office.
• Relocation support for those moving to the Bay Area.

UK Benefits - The following benefits are for our UK-based employees:

• Optional equity donation matching.
• Private health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents.
• Pension contribution (matching 4% of your salary).
• 21 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Unlimited PTO – most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more!
• Health cash plan.
• Life insurance and income protection.
• Daily lunches and snacks in our office.