Research Scientist, Life Sciences (Chemistry)

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 Life Sciences team is building a research group focused on biological discoveries by combining AI with hands-on biological research. We're seeking research scientists with deep expertise in experimental chemistry to join the team. We welcome chemists from across the field, including medicinal, synthetic organic, physical organic, organometallic, inorganic, analytical, physical, and materials chemistry, as well as formulation science. Our goal is to speed up progress in the life sciences by an order of magnitude, and this role puts that mission into practice. You'll be an expert in your area of chemistry with hands-on experience designing, and running experiments, from synthesizing, purifying, and characterizing compounds to studying reaction mechanisms and kinetics. Above all, you'll close the loop between AI-generated hypotheses and experimental data to share with the community. Working alongside AI researchers and engineers, you'll drive experimental programs end to end and pressure-test AI-designed molecules, AI-proposed synthetic routes, and AI-predicted mechanisms and properties against real chemistry.

This role is fully on-site in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Key responsibilities

Depending on your area of chemistry, you will

• Design multi-step synthetic routes for small molecules and oversee their execution end to end, including route selection, reaction optimization, purification strategy, and interpretation of full characterization data (NMR, LC-MS, HPLC)
• Design and run mechanistic, kinetic, and spectroscopic studies to explain and predict reactivity, selectivity, and molecular properties
• Prepare and characterize inorganic and organometallic compounds, materials, and formulations, and relate their composition and structure to their properties
• Coordinate synthesis and biological evaluation with external contract research organizations and academic partners
• Evaluate AI-designed molecules, AI-proposed synthetic routes, and AI-predicted mechanisms and properties, drive them to experimental readout, and feed results back to research teams
• Generate experimental and computational data, for example from quantum mechanical calculations, that research teams use to train and evaluate AI models
• Apply medicinal chemistry principles, including SAR analysis and physicochemical property optimization, to compound design and prioritization
• Ensure experimental data across programs is high quality and well documented, including procedures, spectra, and failure modes
• Communicate findings clearly to chemistry, AI research, and life sciences audiences

Minimum qualif
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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.