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.
Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy
Last summer we published our first Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP), which focuses on addressing catastrophic safety failures and misuse. In adopting such a policy, our primary goal has been to help turn high-level safety concepts into practical policies for fast-moving technical organizations and demonstrate the viability of these measures as possible standards.
Our Responsible Scaling Policy has been a powerful rallying point with many teams' work over the last six months connecting directly back to major RSP work streams. The progress we have made has required significant work from teams across Anthropic and there is much more work to be done. Our new Responsible Scaling Team will:
- Help leadership align on a practical approach to scaling responsibly that will raise the safety waterline in industry, inform regulation, and mitigate catastrophic risks from models
- Rally teams internally to operationalize and implement this technical roadmap and set of high-level commitments, making object level decisions as needed
- Iterate internally on different approaches to safety challenges, feeding these learnings back into the high-level policy, and sharing our learnings with industry and policymakers
As we continue to iterate on and improve the original policy, we are actively exploring ways to incorporate practices from existing risk management and operational safety domains. While none of these domains alone will be perfectly analogous, we expect to find valuable insights from nuclear security, biosecurity, systems safety, autonomous vehicles, aerospace, and cybersecurity. We intend to build an interdisciplinary team to help us integrate the most relevant and valuable practices from each.
Note: For this role, we are looking for candidates who can start within 3 months. We will consider all candidates who can meet the organization's hybrid policy, provided you have significant (60%+) overlap with Pacific Time.About the Role
The Safety Systems Engineer will lead critical technical safety processes at Anthropic by conducting systematic threat modeling and risk assessments across our AI systems. Key deliverables include: performing technical safety reviews of new AI capabilities to identify potential risks before deployment, developing and maintaining a comprehensive AI safety risk register with clear ownership and mitigation strategies, conducting structured assessments to inform the prioritization and design of technical safeguards, and establishing robust validation frameworks to verify safeguard effectiveness.
The role will coordinate closely with Frontier Risk, Trust & Safety, and AI development teams to ensure safety considerations are integrated into technical roadmaps and drive concrete mitigation decisions. This position fills a crucial gap between risk discovery and practical implementation by providing rigorous technical analysis to inform both internal safety decisions and external policy discussions. The engineer will also support the RSP program team to establish scalable technical and scale-able processes for safety including safety reviews, risk monitoring, and incident response as our AI capabilities advance, ensuring we maintain strong safety standards, understand operational risks, while meeting development timelines.Responsibilities:
- Design a practical approach to scaling responsibly that will raise the safety waterline in industry, inform regulation, and mitigate catastrophic risks from models.
- Align leadership and other stakeholder groups on the overall policy and key safety decisions, by making recommendations, synthesizing inputs, and pragmatically balancing competing considerations.
- Work with cross-functional teams to align their technical roadmaps with the RSP, and provide clarity by making or delegating object-level decisions as needed.
- Ensure that any safety cases are robust and have been appropriately stress tested by the time they are made to the board.
- Work closely with the TPM team to ensure that teams have the necessary resources and information to meet RSP objectives on commercially relevant timeframes
- Feeding the implications of technical challenges from safety testing and mitigations back into the high-level policy, and sharing our learnings with industry and policymakers
You may be a good fit if you have:
- Deep expertise in applied system safety and system engineering practices, with a proven track record of applying these to complex systems with AI/ML components.
- Demonstrated ability to develop and implement scalable risk assurance (continuous validation) methods and robust testing frameworks for large, complex systems with AI/ML components
- Strong technical integrity and ethical leadership, with a history of making and defending difficult safety decisions and/or recommendations based on technical expertise
- Ability to balance idealism with practicality in decision-making; capacity to make sound decisions under time pressure or with incomplete information; talent for assessing the real-world feasibility of proposed solutions
- History of quickly mastering complex technical domains, even those outside their primary area of expertise
- Proven ability to communicate complex technical safety considerations to both expert and non-expert stakeholders
- Applied skills with Python, SQL, and able to conduct data analysis
Strong candidates may also have experience with:
- Experience with resilience engineering practices and tools
- Extensive knowledge of AI/ML architectures, training processes, and failure modes specific to AI systems
- Familiarity with evolving AI regulations and standards
- Experience in risk management and safety best practices in complex technical environments.
- Advanced statistical analysis skills
The expected salary range for this position is:
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.
