Biology & Life Sciences Lead

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

As Anthropic’s Biology & Life Sciences Lead, you will spearhead our mission to create AI systems that revolutionize scientific discovery. You'll chart Anthropic's research strategy in the life sciences, lead a team of technical researchers and engineers, secure innovative partnerships, and drive the development of an AI system that can serve as a force multiplier for scientists around the world. This role sits at the nexus of research, strategy, partnerships, and scientific leadership, requiring both business acumen and technical depth.

Responsibilities:

• Developing and executing Anthropic's long-term strategy for advancing biological and life sciences research through AI
• Building and leading a multidisciplinary team of AI researchers, machine learning engineers, and biology domain experts
• Working closely with partnerships team to form strategic partnerships with leading research institutions, platform companies, and laboratories to prototype how Claude can transform biology and life science research 
• Identifying and designing high-leverage applications where Claude can accelerate scientific progress
• Working closely with Anthropic's research and technical teams to guide development of capabilities needed to support life sciences applications
• Representing Anthropic's work in this area to external stakeholders and the broader scientific community

You may be a good fit if you have:

• PhD in biology, computational biology, bioinformatics, or a related field, or equivalent experience
• 7+ years of experience in the life sciences or biotechnology, with demonstrated leadership in research or product development
• Deep understanding of modern biological research practices, tools, and data workflows
• Experience building and leading cross-functional teams
• Strong understanding of AI/ML technologies and how they can be applied to accelerate scientific discovery
• Exceptional communication skills and ability to translate between technical AI capabilities and biological applications
• Demonstrated strategic thinking and ability to identify high-impact opportunities
• Experience taking new research and product directions from zero to one
• Track record of building successful partnerships with research institutions, platforms, or industry
• Experience with AI-powered research tools, large language models, or computational research platforms
• Network of connections across the biomedical research or biotechnology communities

Application Deadline - Friday June 13, 2025

The expected salary range for this position is:

Annual Salary:$220,000—$275,000 USD

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.