Research Engineer, Frontier Red Team (Autonomy) San Francisco, CA

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 Team

The Frontier Red Team (FRT) is a small, focused technical research team within Anthropic's Policy organization. Our goal is to make the entire world safer in this era of advanced AI by understanding what these systems can do and building the defenses that matter.

In 2026, we're focused on researching and ensuring safety with self-improving, highly autonomous AI systems—especially ones with cyberphysical capabilities. See our previous related work on cyberdefense , robotics , and Project Vend . We'll also be collaborating closely with the Emerging Risks workstream to understand novel, societal-scale risks that arise when agents interface with the external world. This is early-stage, high-conviction research with the potential for outsized impact. 

Note: We are exclusively hiring in SF. We support relocation, but all hires must relocate before starting.

About the Role

Our team is focused on a critical question: how do we defend against a world where powerful, autonomous, self-improving AI systems may be used adversarially?

As a Research Engineer on our team, you'll build and eval model organisms of autonomous systems and develop the defensive agents needed to counter them. This work sits at the intersection of AI capabilities research, security, and policy—what we learn directly shapes how Anthropic and the world prepare for advanced AI.

This is applied research with real-world stakes. Your work will inform decisions at the highest levels of the company, contribute to public demonstrations that shape policy discourse, and help build technical defenses that could matter enormously as AI systems become more capable.

What You'll Do

• Design and build autonomous AI systems that can use tools and operate across diverse environments—creating model organisms that help us understand and defend against advanced adversarial AI
• Create evals and training environments to understand and shape agent behavior in desirable ways
• Develop defensive agents that can detect, disrupt, or outcompete adversarial AI systems in realistic scenarios
• Interface Claude with hardware platforms (e.g. robotics, physical systems) to understand cyberphysical risks and defenses
• Translate technical findings into compelling demonstrations and artifacts that inform policymakers and the public
• Collaborate with external experts in cybersecurity, national security, and AI safety to scope and validate research directions

Sample Projects

• Developing systems where Claude controls diverse hardware and robotics platforms simultaneously
• Creating attack-defend simulations (CTFs, wargames, adversarial games) to test defensive AI capabilities
• Designing and implementing RL environments for training defensive agents
• Pointing autonomous systems at real-world security challenges to characterize risks and develop mitigations

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Have strong software engineering skills, particularly in Python
• Have experience building and working with LLM-based agents or autonomous systems
• Are driven to find solutions to ambiguously scoped, high-stakes problems
• Design and run experiments quickly, iterating fast toward useful results
• Thrive in collaborative environments (we love pair programming!)
• Care deeply about AI safety and want your work to have real-world impact on how humanity navigates advanced AI
• Can own entire problems end-to-end, including both technical and non-technical components
• Are comfortable working on sensitive projects that require discretion and integrity

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Experience with reinforcement learning, self-play, or multi-agent systems
• Experience with robotics, hardware interfaces, or cyberphysical systems
• Track record of building demos or prototypes that communicate complex technical ideas
• Experience working with external stakeholders (policymakers, government, researchers)
• Familiarity with AI safety research and threat modeling for advanced AI systems

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:

$320,000 - $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 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 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.