Applied AI Engineer, Startups (Physical AI)

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

As an Applied AI Engineer on the Startups team at Anthropic, you will be a trusted technical advisor to the top AI-native startups building in the physical world, across robotics, semiconductors, aerospace, manufacturing, and civil infrastructure, as they grow from early product to scale. Some of these companies build the hardware itself and want Claude woven into how they design, test, and operate it, and others build the software that engineers everywhere use to design, simulate, test, and scale, and this role works with both. You'll lead deep technical engagements, partnering directly with startup software and hardware engineering teams to help them build their products on Claude and run their own engineering with it, advising on implementation and agent design as they build what is newly possible with AI in the physical world. You will bridge the gap between what Claude can do and what it takes to build real things, working alongside some of the strongest teams in the field on problems that matter and helping mechanical, electrical, and process engineers get the kind of step change that software engineering has had from agentic coding with tools like Claude Code.

Working closely with Applied AI Architects, Account Executives, and Anthropic's Product, Engineering, and Research teams, you'll help startups build at the edge of what is possible with Claude. You'll leverage your AI engineering expertise and your engineering domain knowledge to develop custom evaluation frameworks, design scalable architectures, and create the technical resources that enable physical AI startups to succeed with Claude.

Responsibilities

Serve as a deep technical advisor to high-potential startups building in the physical world, whether Claude sits inside the product they sell or inside the way they design, test, and run their own hardware, working alongside them to push the boundaries of AI in engineering, manufacturing, operations, and more

Work hands-on with startup software and hardware teams through pair programming and architecture reviews that accelerate their development, and understand their engineering workflows end to end, from design and simulation through test, production, and operations, so that your guidance fits how real hardware gets built

Develop prototypes and technical documentation, including evaluation suites, benchmarks grounded in real engineering tasks, AI engineering techniques, and architecture diagrams, that enable startups to build, operate, and scale with Claude

Create reference implementations and sample code that many companies can adopt without starting from scratch,
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n our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

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.