Research Scientist, RSP Evaluations (CBRN, Biosecurity)

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.

We’re building a team that will research and mitigate extreme risks from future models.

This team will intensively red-team models to test the most significant risks they might be capable of in areas such as biosecurity, cybersecurity risks, or autonomy. We believe that clear demonstrations can significantly advance technical research and mitigations, as well as identify effective policy interventions to promote and incentivize safety.

As part of this team, you will lead research to baseline current models and test whether future frontier capabilities could cause significant harm. Day-to-day, you may decide you need to finetune a model to see whether it becomes superhuman in an eval you’ve designed; whiteboard a threat model with a national security expert; test a new training procedure or how a model uses a tool; or brief government, labs, and other research teams. Our goal is to see the frontier before we get there.

We’re currently hiring for our CBRN workstream, with an emphasis on biosecurity risks. By nature, this team will be an unusual combination of backgrounds. We are particularly looking for people with experience in these domains:

• Biosecurity: You're a biologist who's concerned about the implications of AI development. You're an academic who researches biosecurity defense. You have experience modeling biological phenomena or developing advanced threat modeling simulations. 
• Science: You’re an ML researcher who builds agents to augment chemistry or biology research. You’ve built a protein language model and you enjoyed looking through the embedding space. You’re a team lead at an ML-for-drug discovery company. You’ve built software for astronauts or materials scientists.
• Evaluations: You’ve managed a large-scale benchmark development project, in AI or other domains. You have ideas about how AI and ML evaluations can be better.

Do not rule yourself out if you do not fit one of those categories - it’s plausible the people we’re looking for do not fit any of the above! If you think about the most significant upsides and downsides of AI, and you can do good research to get glimpses of what those look like, please consider applying.

Please note: We will only be considering candidates who can be based in the Bay Area for this role.

Responsibilities

• Independently lead small research projects while collaborating with team members on larger initiatives
• Design, run, and analyze scientific experiments to advance our understanding of large language models
• Work with external partners to develop novel evaluations to accurately assess the biosecurity implications of our models
• Synthesize biosecurity research to establish thresholds of concern for AI capabilities
• Develop a framework for how we might assess the impact of AI on biosecurity
• Communicate our findings to external stakeholders, such as policymakers

You may be a good fit if you

• Have one of:
• Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in the biological sciences (Molecular Biology, Computational Biology, Bioengineering) or 4+ years of professional experience in biology research (including wet-lab) and some familiarity with machine learning or software engineering (Python preferred)
• Professional work experience in software engineering or machine learning and professional work experience in biosecurity
• Have expertise in Python and experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch preferred)
• Have familiarity with prompting and engineering large language models
• Have previous experience leading large projects with multiple external collaborators or stakeholders
• Are able to balance research goals with practical engineering constraints
• Have strong problem-solving skills and a results-oriented mindset
• Have excellent communication skills and ability to work in a collaborative environment
• Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
• Prefer fast-moving collaborative projects to extensive solo efforts
• Care about the societal impacts of AI

Strong candidates may also have experience with

• Wet lab experience in molecular biology
• Previous experience with developing evaluations or benchmarks for large language models
• Familiarity with GPUs, Kubernetes, and OS internals
• Experience with language modeling using transformer architectures
• Previous experience in emerging technology policy, including in biosecurity or AI

Representative projects

• Design and implement a new evaluation to test models for CBRN risks
• Manage a large-scale automated evaluations run across our clusters
• Develop a detailed threat model of CBRN risks, and identify how core bottlenecks can be resolved from further evaluations
• Prepare briefing materials to share the results of an evaluation run with external research groups

Candidates need not have

• Previous professional experience in AI Safety
• 100% of the skills needed to perform the job

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. 

The expected salary range for this position is:

Annual Salary:$280,000—$315,000 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.

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.

Compensation and Benefits for Full-Time Employees*

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 for Full-Time Employees -  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 for Full-Time Employees -  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.

* This compensation and benefits information is based on Anthropic’s good faith estimate for this position as of the date of publication and may be modified in the future. Employees based outside of the UK or US will receive a different benefits package. The level of pay within the range will depend on a variety of job-related factors, including where you place on our internal performance ladders, which is based on factors including past work experience, relevant education, and performance on our interviews or in a work trial.

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.