Applied AI Engineer, Startups (Physical AI)

About the Position

Applied AI Engineer, Startups (Physical AI)

San Francisco, CA

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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.

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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 startups building in the physical world, across robotics, semiconductors, aerospace, manufacturing, and civil infrastructure, as they grow from early product to scale. You'll lead deep technical engagements, partnering directly with startup software and hardware engineering teams to help them build their products on Claude and run their own engineering with it, advising on implementation and agent design as they build what is newly possible with AI in the physical world.

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Responsibilities

• Serve as a deep technical advisor to high-potential startups building in the physical world, whether Claude sits inside the product they sell or inside the way they design, test, and run their own hardware.
• Work hands-on with startup software and hardware teams through pair programming and architecture reviews that accelerate their development.
• Develop prototypes and technical documentation, including evaluation suites, benchmarks grounded in real engineering tasks, AI engineering techniques, and architecture diagrams.
• 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 applying AI to physical systems, then build repeatable evaluations and solutions 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.
• Foster community engagement through hackathons, webinars, technical office hours, and startup-focused events.
• Travel to customer sites for workshops, implementation guidance, and relationship building.

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Requirements

• Deep engineering experience in a physical discipline such as mechanical, electrical, aerospace, robotics, semiconductor, manufacturing, or civil engineering, gained by designing, building, or operating real hardware.
• 4+ years of technical experience as a software engineer, ML or research engineer, robotics or controls engineer, hardware or systems engineer, or technical founder.
• 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 software and hardware engineering audiences.
• A collaborative approach to working across teams, the range of a generalist who can context-switch from robots to chips to rockets to factories and get up to speed on a new domain quickly, and a passion for making powerful technology safe and beneficial.

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We Offer

• Competitive salary: $280,000 - $320,000 USD annually
• Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time.
• 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.

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About the Company

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.

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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.

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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.