About the Position

Research Engineer, Visual Knowledge Work

New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA

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

We're looking for a research engineer who believes that visual and spatial reasoning are core to fully unlocking the capabilities of LLMs. On the Vision team, you'll own the end-to-end process of creating training data and RL environments targeting visual knowledge work: identifying long-horizon and vision-heavy tasks, building evals, designing rewards, and scaling data. This is a unique role that combines applied research with hands-on data work. It's also highly collaborative - you'll partner with external vendors, pretraining, RL, and product teams to make sure the environments you build translate into real-world knowledge work capabilities.

Responsibilities

Own the data strategy for vision capabilities end-to-end, from building evals and scaling RL environments
Manage technical relationships with external data vendors, including writing task specifications, evaluating visual data and annotation quality, and iterating on reward design
Develop and improve QA frameworks that catch reward hacking and ensure environment quality at scale
Run generalization experiments to measure how data strategy changes improve multimodal capabilities on held-out evaluations
Partner with pretraining, RL, and product teams, and do the science that shows we’re all rowing in the same direction

Requirements

Have 7+ years of ML, computer vision, and software engineering experience through industry, academia, or other projects
Have experience with reinforcement learning, reward design, or training data curation for large language or vision-language models
Are familiar with the architecture, training, and operation of large vision language models
Are comfortable managing technical vendor relationships and iterating quickly on feedback
Are results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
Care about the societal impacts of your work

Nice to Have

Designing evals or benchmarks for LLMs or vision language models
Large-scale pretraining, SL, and RL on language models
Deep learning research on images, video, or other modalities
Developing complex agentic systems using LLMs
Large-scale ETL and data pipeline development

Representative Projects

Writing a vendor-facing specification for a new family of visual RL training tasks, then iterating with the vendor on coverage, quality, and reward design
Running experiments to determine ideal training datamixes and parameters for a synthetically generated vision dataset
Finetuning Claude to maximize its performance using a particular set of agent tools/skills

Compensation

Annual Salary: $350,000 - $850,000 USD

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 Offer

Competitive compensation and benefits
Optional equity donation matching
Generous vacation and parental leave
Flexible working hours
A lovely office space in San Francisco

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 strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team and believe that representation is crucial given the enormous social and ethical implications of the AI systems we're building.

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.

Research Engineer, Visual Knowledge Work

Job description