Research Engineer, Rule of Law
Anthropic
San Francisco, California
Full-Time
$320,000
HybridExecutive
Anthropics 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.
Anthropics 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.
Anthropic is a public benefit corporation building some of the world's most powerful AI systems. The Anthropic Institute is a new externally-facing organization within Anthropic whose purpose is to give the world new information about how the AI systems we build are affecting the economy, democratic institutions, and the people and organizations that interact with our systems.
The Institute sits inside a frontier lab, with access to information only AI developers possess. That position is what makes our work different. We don't just study AI from the outside. We study it from within.
Increasingly powerful AI systems will challenge societal functions at all levels. Anthropic has done pioneering work examining the economic impacts of AI; the Rule of Law Team takes an analogous approach to a different question: how will AI impact our constitutional democratic institutions? We ask how AI might put pressure on democracy and the rule of law, and we seek out ways of protecting democratic freedoms, both in the short and long term, and through strategies aimed at technology as well as policy.
As a Research Engineer on the Rule of Law team, you'll conduct technical and sociotechnical research at the intersection of AI and democratic institutions. Your work will span safety evaluations, model improvement, institutional analysis, and the development of novel applications of AI to support civic life and efficient and accountable government. The work will directly contribute to our research publications, policy work, safety systems, and products.
Although our work will evolve over time, it currently spans three broad areas:
Assuring that our AI agents rigorously obey the law: evaluations and fine-tuning to assess and improve how models process legal constraints, including alignment work in settings where defining the optimization objective is hard and novel techniques may needed.
Helping to ensure that AI reinforces the foundations of constitutional democracy: understanding how AI will impact the structure of government itself, and doing what we can to uphold popular sovereignty, ethical and accountable government, and the rule of law, including through the collaborative development of new applications of AI itself.
Enriching and expanding civic participation: using AI to support democratic deliberation, improve the interface between citizens and government services, and help citizens deliberate with one another in an informed and constructive way around policy issues.
Design and run AI safety evaluations focused on legal alignment, and conduct technical work (including fine-tuning) to improve targeted aspects of model performance
Leverage AI to analyze institutional vulnerabilities created or exacerbated by AI itself, and develop accompanying sociotechnical mitigations
Develop novel applications of AI to bolster and enrich democratic processes
Conduct rigorous sociotechnical studies on how information furnished by AI can support informed deliberation and debate
Partner closely with researchers, policy and law experts, and other cross-functional teams across Anthropic to advance our safety mission
Translate research insights into actionable recommendations for both product and policy
Have deep expertise in AI together with substantive expertise in government, law, political science, or public policy
Have advanced skills in deep learning, together with capabilities in data science, mechanism design, govtech, deliberative tech, or a related field
Deeply understand experimental design, data analysis and inferential statistics
Have at least five years of work experience in academia, industry, or government
Are comfortable navigating the ambiguity inherent to novel research, including settings where the objective itself is hard to define
Have strong technical skills in sociotechnical settings: thinking carefully about human factors, how AI systems interact with groups of humans, and human behavior
Are energized by working at the intersection of technical research and questions of democracy and institutional design
Designing and running evaluations or fine-tuning experiments on large language models
Large-scale data analysis
UX and interface design, with an eye toward making complex tools intuitive for non-technical users
Engineering with privacy considerations front of mind
Research relating to deliberative technology, civic technology, or the societal impacts of AI
Working with or within government, courts, legislatures, or public policy institutions
AI safety evaluations focusing on legal alignment, with technical work to improve targeted aspects of model performance
Analysis of institutional vulnerabilities, with accompanying work toward technical mitigations
Development of novel applications for AI to bolster and enrich democratic processes
Sociotechnical work focused on how information furnished by AI can support informed deliberation and debate
The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.
For sales roles, the range provided is the roles On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.
Minimum education: Bachelors 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 linksvisit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.
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.
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.