Infrastructure Software Engineer (Interpretability)

• When you see what modern language models are capable of, do you wonder, “How do these things work? How can we trust them?”
• The Interpretability team at Anthropic works to understand what’s actually happening inside trained models - and applies our best techniques to keep frontier AI safe as it rapidly improves
• Think of us as doing “neuroscience” of neural networks using “microscopes” we build - or reverse-engineering neural networks like binary programs
• This role is an early hire on a new infrastructure effort within Interpretability: you’ll help define its charter, not just execute it
• Interpretability research requires deep access to frontier models while retaining a high degree of research flexibility. Your job is to build the paved path that makes that access secure by default, private by design, and low-friction for every researcher. The work spans four areas:
• Security: design the secure-by-default environments and access patterns that enable deep model access for an organization whose research requires it - done well, the same design improves both our security posture and research productivity
• Privacy: build data-access patterns that ensure policy adherence as our research moves from theory into practical application
• Data & Compute Management: manage research data at petabyte scale and make efficient use of large accelerator fleets - storage lifecycle, capacity planning, and scheduling
• Developer experience: agentic engineering, tooling and observability that keep researchers moving fast
• In this role, you’ll be deeply embedded alongside Interp Researchers to understand their workflows - building your understanding of the research as you go; at the same time you’ll bridge communication with Anthropic’s wider platform and security teams.. Every hour of researcher friction you remove is multiplied across the whole organization, and the infrastructure you build sets the pace at which interpretability results reach real safety decisions
• Design, build, and own shared infrastructure for Interpretability - research environments, data systems, and compute tooling that researchers rely on daily
• Lead cross-team efforts with our agentic engineering, security, compute, and storage platform teams, so that company-wide solutions serve research needs
• Discover and resolve major organization-wide developer experience issues
• Help take interpretability methods from research code to dependable audit pipelines
• Design and stand up a hardened research environment where researchers experiment directly on frontier model weights
• Build lifecycle management for petabytes of research data - visibility, retention, and cost efficiency
• Build self-serve scheduling and capacity tooling
• Create the observability that catch infrastructure regressions before they cost researchers valuable time

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents
• Inclusive fertility benefits via Carrot Fertility
• 22 weeks of paid parental leave
• Flexible paid time off and absence policies
• Mental health support for you and your dependents
• Competitive salary and equity packages
• Optional equity donation matching at a 1:1 ratio, up to 25% of your equity grant
• Retirement plans with competitive matching
• Life and income protection plans
• $500/month flexible wellness and time saver stipend
• Commuter benefits
• Annual education stipend
• Home office stipends
• Relocation support for those moving for Anthropic
• Daily meals and snacks in the office- Have strong cross-functional communication skills - equally at home working with researchers and with platform and security teams
• Are curious about interpretability research and its role in AI safety (though no research experience is required!)
• Are extremely curious about unfamiliar domains
• Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work
• Have significant experience building and operating secure and scalable software infrastructure - cloud systems, distributed systems, or developer tooling
• Are highly proficient in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Rust, Go, Java) and productive with Python
• Have a strong ability to prioritize the most impactful work and are comfortable operating with ambiguity and questioning assumptions
• Experience building tooling to accelerate research teams
• Security engineering experience: identity / auth / access management, sandboxing, red teaming
• Experience with compute schedulers and accelerator fleet management
• Experience with data warehousing, large-scale storage systems, and data lifecycle management - especially for research
• Experience building developer productivity tooling and observability stacks
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (e.g. GCP or AWS), Kubernetes, networking and infrastructure-as-code
• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
• Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
• 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