Software Engineer, Safeguards Evals

Software Engineer, Safeguards Evals

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

How do we know our safety systems actually catch misuse? Anthropic increasingly uses AI to investigate potential misuse of Claude — analyzing real-world traffic to surface bad actors, policy violations, and emerging threats. Its findings inform enforcement actions and model launch decisions, which means we need rigorous, trustworthy answers to questions like: Does the monitoring agent catch what it should? Where does it fail? Does it stay reliable as adversaries adapt, as models improve, and as the agent itself changes?

This role builds the evaluation infrastructure that answers those questions. You'll sit at the intersection of applied ML research and engineering — designing experiments to measure how well an investigative agent performs across harm areas, building datasets that represent real abuse rather than synthetic benchmarks, and shipping those methods into pipelines that gate every change to the system. Your work directly determines how much trust Anthropic can place in its automated abuse detection, and where we invest to make it better.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and own the evaluation harness for an agentic investigation system — defining metrics, test cases and grading approaches for a complex long horizon agent
• Construct high-quality eval datasets representing real-world misuse across harm areas (e.g., cyber attacks, bio weapons, influence operations), drawing from real traffic patterns and synthetic generation
• Measure agent performance end-to-end (detection precision/recall, investigation quality, robustness) and drive hill-climbing on the hardest harm areas
• Analyze coverage to identify measurement gaps, and evolve evals so they remain unsaturated and high-signal as agent capabilities advance
• Productionize successful research into regression and release pipelines that run on every agent change, prompt update, and underlying model upgrade
• Build tooling that enables policy experts to author, run, and iterate on evaluations without engineering support
• Construct RL environments to improve Claude's safety investigation capabilities.

Minimum Qualifications

• Proficiency in Python and comfort working across the stack
• Experience building and maintaining data pipelines
• Experience working with LLMs and a working understanding of their capabilities and failure modes — especially agentic systems with tool use and multi-step reasoning
• Strong data analysis skills — you can draw reliable insights from large datasets
• Ability to move fluidly between research prototyping and production-quality code
• Ability to translate ambiguous problems into concrete, testable experiments

Preferred Qualifications

• 6+ years of industry software engineering experience
• Expertise in building or contributing to agent evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, or automated grading systems
• Extensive experience in trust and safety, content moderation, or abuse detection systems
• Experience in red teaming, adversarial testing, or jailbreak research on AI systems
• Experience with synthetic data generation or data augmentation
• Experience with distributed systems or large-scale data processing
• Experience with prompt engineering or building LLM-powered applications

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.