Full-Stack Software Engineer, Reinforcement Learning

About the Position

Full-Stack Software Engineer, Reinforcement Learning

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 a Full-Stack Software Engineer in RL, you'll build the platforms, tools, and interfaces that power environment creation, data collection, and training observability. The quality of our next-generation AI depends on the quality of the data we train it on - and the systems you build are what make that data possible.

You'll own product surfaces end-to-end - from backend services and APIs to the web UIs that researchers, external vendors, and thousands of data labelers use every day. You don't need a background in ML research. What matters is that you can take an ambiguous, high-stakes problem and ship a polished, reliable product against it, fast.

This team moves very quickly. Our AI writes a lot of the code we commit, which means the bottleneck isn't typing - it's judgment, taste, and the ability to react to what researchers need next. You'll iterate on data collection strategies to distill the knowledge of thousands of human experts around the world into our models, and you'll do it in a loop that closes in hours and days, not quarters or months.

Anthropic's Reinforcement Learning organization leads the research and development that trains our AI to be capable, reliable, and safe. We've contributed to every model, with significant impact on the autonomy and coding capabilities of our most advanced models. Our work spans teaching models to use computers effectively, advancing code generation through RL, pioneering fundamental RL research for large language models, and building the scalable training methodologies behind our frontier production models.

Responsibilities

• Build and extend web platforms for RL environment creation, management, and quality review - including environment configuration, versioning, and validation workflows
• Develop vendor-facing interfaces and tooling that let external partners create, submit, and iterate on training environments with minimal friction
• Design and implement platforms for human data collection at scale, including labeling workflows, quality assurance systems, and feedback mechanisms that surface reward signal integrity issues early
• Build evaluation dashboards and observability UIs that give researchers real-time insight into environment quality, training run health, and reward hacking
• Create backend services and APIs that connect environment authoring tools, data collection systems, and RL training infrastructure
• Build and expand scalable code data generation pipelines, producing diverse programming tasks with robust reward signals across languages and difficulty levels
• Develop onboarding automation and documentation tooling so new vendors and internal users ramp up in hours, not weeks
• Partner closely with RL researchers, data operations, and vendor management to translate ambiguous requirements into well-scoped, well-designed products

Requirements

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and real full-stack range - you're comfortable owning a surface from database schema to frontend
• Proficient in Python and a modern web stack (React, TypeScript, or similar)
• Track record of shipping systems that solved a hard problem, not just shipped on time
• Operate with high agency: you identify what needs to be done and drive it forward without waiting for a ticket
• Care about UX and can build interfaces that are intuitive for both technical researchers and non-technical labelers
• Communicate clearly with researchers, operations teams, and engineers, and can turn vague asks into well-scoped work
• Thrive in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift, and the next problem is often one nobody has solved before
• Care about Anthropic's mission to build safe, beneficial AI and want your work to contribute directly to it

Nice to Have

• Built data collection, labeling, or annotation platforms - ideally ones that had to scale across many vendors or many task types
• Background building multi-tenant platforms with role-based access, audit trails, and vendor management workflows
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS), Docker, and CI/CD pipelines
• Familiarity with LLM training, fine-tuning, or evaluation workflows
• Experience with async Python (Trio, asyncio) or high-throughput API design
• Background in dashboards, monitoring, or observability tooling
• Experience working directly with external vendors or partners on technical integrations
• A background that isn't a straight line - e.g. math or physics into SWE, competitive programming, research into engineering, or a side project that outgrew its scope

Representative Projects

• Building a unified platform for human data collection that integrates labeling workflows, vendor management, and QA for complex agentic tasks
• Developing vendor onboarding automation that handles Docker registry access, API token management, and environment validation
• Creating evaluation and observability dashboards that catch reward hacks, measure environment difficulty, and give real-time feedback during production training
• Building environment quality review workflows that let researchers browse, grade, and provide feedback on training environments
• Developing automated environment quality pipelines that validate correctness and difficulty calibration before environments hit production training
• Building internal tools for browsing and analyzing training run results, environment statistics, and data collection progress

We Offer

• Competitive compensation: Annual Salary: $300,000-$405,000 USD
• Optional equity donation matching
• Generous vacation and parental leave
• Flexible working hours
• Lovely office space in San Francisco or New York City
• Hybrid work location policy

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: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
• 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.

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.

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.

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.