Biological Safety Research Scientist

Biological Safety Research Scientist

San Francisco, CA

About the Role

We are looking for biological scientists to help build safety and oversight mechanisms for our AI systems. As a Safeguards Biological Safety Research Scientist, you will apply your technical skills to design and develop our safety systems which detect harmful behaviors and to prevent misuse by sophisticated threat actors. You will be at the forefront of defining what responsible AI safety looks like in the biological domain, working across research, policy, and engineering to translate complex biosecurity concepts into concrete technical safeguards. This is a unique opportunity to shape how frontier AI models handle dual-use biological knowledge—balancing the tremendous potential of AI to accelerate legitimate life sciences research while preventing misuse by sophisticated threat actors.

In this role, you will:

• Design and execute capability evaluations ("evals") to assess the capabilities of new models
• Collaborate closely with internal and external threat modeling experts to develop training data for our safety systems, and with ML engineers to train these safety systems, optimizing for both robustness against adversarial attacks and low false-positive rates for legitimate researchers
• Analyze safety system performance in traffic, identifying gaps and proposing improvements
• Develop rigorous stress-testing of our safeguards against evolving threats and product surfaces
• Partner with Research, Product, and Policy teams to ensure biological safety is embedded throughout the model development lifecycle
• Contribute to external communications, including model cards, blog posts, and policy documents related to biological safety
• Monitor emerging technologies for their potential to contribute to new risks and new mitigation strategies, and strategically address these

Minimum Qualifications:

• A PhD in molecular biology, virology, microbiology, biochemistry, systems or computational biology, or a related life sciences field, OR equivalent professional experience
• Extensive experience in scientific computing and data analysis, with proficiency in programming (Python preferred)
• Deep expertise in modern biology, including both "reading" (e.g. high-throughput measurement, functional assays) and "writing" (gene synthesis, genome editing, strain construction, protein engineering) techniques in biology
• Familiarity with dual-use research concerns, select agent regulations, and biosecurity frameworks (e.g., Biological Weapons Convention, Australia Group guidelines)
• Strong analytical and writing skills, with the ability to navigate ambiguity and explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• Have a passion for learning new skills and an ability to rapidly adapt to changing techniques and technologies
• Comfort working in a fast-paced environment where priorities may shift as AI capabilities evolve

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in AI/ML systems, particularly experience with large language models
• Experience in developing ML for biological systems
• Extensive experience in complex projects with multiple stakeholders

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.