Research Prompt Engineer

Prompt engineering is the art of instructing large language models in a way that delivers the most nuanced and high quality outputs. It is a hybrid between programming, instructing, and iterative experimentation. As a research prompt engineer, your role would be to work with our finetuning researchers to help deliver the best results from our models. This will include but need not be limited to: building on existing prompting techniques, developing new prompting techniques, testing prompt effectiveness, documenting prompts, supporting prompt testing infrastructure, and running experiments using the prompts you help to develop. You will be engaged in creative and cutting-edge finetuning research that will improve the performance and safety of frontier models.
Given that this is a nascent field, we ask that you share with us a specific prompt engineering project on LLMs that you’re proud of in your application! Ideally this project should show off a complex and clever prompting architecture, or a systematic evaluation of an LLM’s behavior in response to different prompts, or an example of using LLMs for a relevant ML task such as careful dataset curation and processing. There is no preferred task, we just want to see how you create and experiment with prompts. You can also include a short description of the process you used or any roadblocks you hit and how to deal with them, but this is not a requirement.
About AnthropicAnthropic is an AI safety and research company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our customers and for society as a whole. Our interdisciplinary team has experience across ML, physics, policy, business and product.

Responsibilities:

• Develop new, creative, and original prompting strategies for a wide range of research tasks relevant to our fine-tuning efforts.
• Build upon and improve existing prompting techniques to increase their effectiveness and efficiency.
• Test and assess the effectiveness of both existing and newly developed prompts.
• Create and maintain documentation of prompts and promote internal knowledge sharing.
• Help to create and maintain the infrastructure required for efficient prompt iteration and testing.
• Work with finetuning researchers to run experiments using the prompts you have helped create.
• Stay up-to-date with the latest research in prompt engineering and share knowledge with the team.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have extensive prior experience exploring and testing language model behavior.
• Have a high level familiarity with the architecture and operation of large language models.
• Have good communication skills and an interest in working with researchers on difficult prompting tasks.
• Have a creative hacker spirit and a love of puzzle solving.
• Have a firm grasp of programming in Python and experience with data structures.

Strong candidates may also have:

• Advanced degree in computer science, mathematics, statistics, physics, or a related technical field, or an advanced degree in a relevant non-technical field alongside evidence of programming experience.
• Research experience in machine learning, natural language processing, or a related field.
• Experience with large-scale model training and evaluation.
• Passion for making powerful technology safe and societally beneficial.

Annual Salary:

• The expected salary range for this position is $280k – $600k 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.