Research Scientist, Life Sciences (Large Molecules, Antibody Design)

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 a research scientist with deep expertise in therapeutic antibodies to join the team. 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 antibody design and engineering who has taken antibodies through the whole process, from target selection and lead optimization to candidate selection and IND-enabling studies. 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 antibody programs end to end and pressure-test AI-designed antibodies against the bar a real drug candidate has to clear.

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

Key responsibilities

• Design and engineer therapeutic antibodies and oversee programs end to end, including target and epitope selection, choice of format (IgG, Fab, scFv, VHH, bispecific), humanization, affinity maturation, Fc engineering, and candidate selection
• Define the screening cascade for each program, from binding kinetics (SPR, BLI), epitope binning, and species cross-reactivity to cell-based functional assays and developability (expression, aggregation, polyreactivity, stability, viscosity, immunogenicity risk)
• Plan the path from lead to IND-enabling studies, including in vivo pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, toxicology, and the handoff to process development and manufacturing
• Coordinate antibody production, characterization, and in vitro and in vivo studies with external contract research organizations and academic partners
• Evaluate AI-designed antibodies, drive them to experimental readout, and feed results back to research teams
• Ensure experimental data across programs is high quality and well documented, including sequences, protocols, raw data, and failure modes
• Communicate findings clearly to biology, AI research, and life sciences audiences

Minimum qualifications

• PhD in biochemistry, protein engineering, immunology, molecular biology, or a related field
• Demonstrated experience in therapeutic antibody discovery and engineering, including at least one antibody you helped take from discovery through candidate selection and IND-enabling studies
• Working knowledge of what an antibody IND requires across pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, toxicology, and chemistry, manufacturing, and controls (CMC)
• Comfort navigating ambiguity and defining p

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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.