Machine Learning Infrastructure Engineer, Safeguards Research

The posting, as Anthropic wrote it

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

Anthropic's Safeguards team builds the systems that detect and mitigate misuse of our AI models, from individual policy violations to sophisticated, coordinated attacks. A growing part of that work depends on lightweight detection methods trained on model internals, which let us identify harmful behavior cheaply and at scale. This work feeds directly into Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy commitments.

We're looking for an engineer to own the infrastructure behind that research. This is the tooling our researchers rely on to run experiments, train detection methods, and select detections for launch. It sits between research and production: researchers depend on it for fast iteration, and our detection systems depend on it for reliable, correct results as our models continue to change.

Running machine learning workloads at our scale often requires solving novel systems problems. You'll identify those problems and build the abstractions, pipelines, and tooling that keep the research loop fast as requirements shift underneath you. Strong candidates will have a track record of solving large-scale systems and data problems and will be excited to grow deep machine learning expertise alongside it.

Key responsibilities

• Build and scale the infrastructure and data pipelines behind Safeguards machine learning research
• Own the training, evaluation, and scoring workflows researchers use, with a focus on cutting the time between an idea and a result
• Design tooling and interfaces, including libraries and command line tools, that researchers can use directly without needing to understand the systems underneath
• Build correctness and sanity checking into the stack, so results stay trustworthy as models and workloads evolve
• Take the highest-value research workflows from experiments to reliable, production-grade jobs
• Improve the throughput, cost, and reliability of large-scale inference and scoring workloads
• Partner closely with researchers and engineers across Safeguards to understand their workflows, anticipate how their needs will change, and design for that ahead of time

Minimum qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and hands-on coding ability, with proficiency in Python
• Experience building and operating data-intensive or distributed systems in production
• Experience building tooling or infrastructure that other engineers or researchers use as a dependency
• Comfort working across the research-to-deployment pipeline, from exploratory experiments to production systems
• Ability to debug performance and correctness problems across an unfamiliar stack

[…]
n our team.

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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. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.