Research Engineer, Cybersecurity RL (Reinforcement Learning)

About the Team

The Security team protects Anthropic's AI systems and maintains the trust of our users and society.

About the Role

At Anthropic, we are pioneering new frontiers in AI that have the potential to greatly benefit society. However, developing advanced AI also comes with risks if not properly safeguarded. As a Research Engineer, you'll help to safely advance the capabilities of our models in incident response, security analysis, vulnerability remediation, and other areas of defensive cybersecurity.

This role blends research and engineering, requiring you to both develop novel approaches and realize them in code. Your work will include designing and implementing RL environments, conducting experiments and evaluations, delivering your work into production training runs, and collaborating with other researchers, engineers, and cybersecurity specialists across and outside Anthropic.

This role requires ML experience combined with domain expertise in cybersecurity. You might be an ML researcher with a history of cybersecurity work, or a security professional with a background in ML.

Responsibilities

• Partner with researchers and safety teams across Anthropic to understand their analytical needs and build solutions
• Develop agentic integrations that allow AI systems to autonomously investigate and act on analytical findings
• Contribute to the strategic direction of the team, including decisions about what to build, what to partner on, and where to invest
• This role may require participation in an on-call rotation.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have experience with machine learning.
• Have experience in cybersecurity research.
• Have strong software engineering skills.
• Can balance research exploration with engineering implementation.
• Are passionate about AI's potential and committed to developing safe and beneficial systems.

Strong candidates may also have

• Professional experience in security engineering, fuzzing, detection and response, or other applied defensive work.
• Experience participating in or building CTF competitions and cyber ranges.
• Academic research experience in cybersecurity or other experimental & research background.
• Familiarity with RL techniques and environments.
• Familiarity with LLM training methodologies.

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$1—$2 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.

How we're different

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.