About the Position

Applied AI Engineer, Startups (Life Sciences)

San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY

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 life sciences and biotech startups as they grow from early product to scale. You'll bridge the gap between what our AI model, Claude, can do and what the life sciences need, working alongside some of the strongest teams in the field on problems that matter and pushing the boundaries of AI in science as you go.

Responsibilities

Serve as a deep technical advisor to high-potential life sciences and biotech startups, whether our model sits inside the product they sell or inside the way they make discoveries, working alongside them to build innovative use cases that push the boundaries of AI in scientific research and development.
Work hands-on with startup engineering teams and their scientists through pair programming and architecture reviews that accelerate their development.
Develop prototypes and technical documentation, including evaluation suites, scientifically grounded benchmarks, AI engineering techniques, and architecture diagrams, that enable startups to build, operate, and scale with our model.
Create reference implementations and sample code that many companies can adopt without starting from scratch.
Collaborate closely with Applied AI Architects to maintain context and continuity across customer engagements.
Identify patterns across engagements, including what is hard about deploying AI in the life sciences such as heterogeneous data, auditability requirements, and the gap between a working prototype and a system that scientists trust, and contribute insights back to Product, Engineering, Research, and the broader Applied AI team.
Create technical content for startup audiences including documentation, tutorials, and sample code.
Represent Anthropic across the life sciences startup ecosystem and foster community engagement through hackathons, webinars, technical office hours, in-person founder events, and research show and tells.
Travel to customer sites for workshops, implementation guidance, and relationship building.

Requirements

Deep experience in the life sciences or biotech, gained through research or industry work in areas such as genomics, drug discovery, molecular design, lab automation, or clinical development, along with strong opinions of your own about how to bridge the gap between what AI can do today and what the life sciences need.
4+ years of technical experience as a software engineer, ML or research engineer, computational biologist, research scientist, or technical founder, with either production experience building LLM-powered applications, including prompting, context engineering, agent architectures, evaluation frameworks, and deployment at scale, or a track record of successfully applying AI to real scientific work in the lab or in research.
Experience with startups or high-growth companies and a love of working with founders and small teams that move quickly.
Strong technical communication skills, with the ability to translate complex AI concepts into architectural decisions and actionable implementation plans for both engineering and scientific audiences and to run technical workshops, hackathons, or developer-focused events.
A collaborative approach to working across teams, the ability to context-switch across scientific domains and use cases, and a passion for making powerful technology safe and beneficial.

We Offer

Annual Salary: $280,000 - $320,000 USD
Competitive compensation and benefits
Optional equity donation matching
Generous vacation and parental leave
Flexible working hours
Lovely office space in San Francisco

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.
Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.
Minimum years of experience: 4+ years of technical experience.
Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.
Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

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.

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.

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.

Applied AI Engineer, Startups (Life Sciences)

Job description