Anthropic
Research Engineer, Knowledge Bases
Job Description
About the roleWe are looking for Research Engineers to help us redesign how Language Models interact with external data sources. Many of the paradigms for how data and knowledge bases are organized assume human consumers and constraints. This is no longer true in a world of Language Models! Your job will be to design new architectures for how information is organized, and train language models to optimally use those architectures.
What you will be working on:
- Designing and implementing from scratch new information architecture strategies
- Performing finetuning and reinforcement learning to “teach” language models how to interact with new information architectures
- Building “hard” knowledge base eval sets to help identify failure modes of how language models work with external data
- Extending traditional ideas like RAG into heterogeneous data types (image, tables, relational data, etc)
You may be a good fit if you:
- Have significant Python programming experience
- Have good machine learning research experience
- Have experience developing software that utilizes Large Language Models such as Claude
- Are results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
- Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
- Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
- Want to partner with world-class ML researchers to develop new LLM capabilities
- Care about the societal impacts of your work
- Have clear written and verbal communication
Strong candidates will also have experience with:
- Developing scalable distributed information retrieval systems, such as search engines, knowledge graphs, indexing, ranking, query understanding, and distributed data processing
- Conducting research to advance search quality and knowledge base systems
- Understanding Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and its limitations
- Collaborating with product teams to quickly prototype and deliver innovative solutions
Annual Salary (USD)The expected salary range for this position is $280k – $485k USD.
LogisticsLocation-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in our office at least 25% of the time.
Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.US visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren’t able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate; operations roles are especially difficult to support. But if we make you an offer, we will make every effort to get you into the United States, 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*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 – On top of this position’s salary (listed above), 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 – The following benefits are for our US-based employees:- Optional equity donation matching at a 3:1 ratio, up to 50% of your equity grant.- 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 – The following benefits are for our UK-based employees:- Optional equity donation matching at a 3:1 ratio, up to 50% of your equity grant.- Private health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents.- Pension contribution (matching 4% of your salary).- 22 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 differentWe 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. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both as needed.
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 based 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.
