Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training
Anthropic · San Francisco, CA | New York City · Onsite
Anthropic
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who left to pursue a more safety-focused approach to building powerful AI systems. Its flagship product, the Claude family of large language models, competes directly with OpenAI's GPT series and Google's Gemini, and has become widely used in enterprise and developer settings, particularly for coding and reasoning tasks. The company positions itself distinctly within the AI industry by emphasizing interpretability and alignment research alongside commercial deployment, framing itself as a lab racing to build capable frontier models while trying to ensure they remain steerable and beneficial as capabilities scale.
Gig description
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 Anthropic's production models undergo sophisticated post-training processes to enhance their capabilities, alignment, and safety. As a Research Engineer on our Post-Training team, you'll train our base models through the complete post-training stack to deliver the production Claude models that users interact with. You'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge research and production engineering, implementing, scaling, and improving post-training techniques like Constitutional AI, RLHF, and other alignment methodologies. Your work will directly impact the quality, safety, and capabilities of our production models. Note: For this role, we conduct all interviews in Python. This role may require responding to incidents on short-notice, including on weekends. Responsibilities: Implement and optimize post-training techniques at scale on frontier models Conduct research to develop and optimize post-training recipes that directly improve production model quality Design, build, and run robust, efficient pipelines for model fine-tuning and evaluation Develop tools to measure and improve model performance across various dimensions Collaborate with research teams to translate emerging techniques into production-ready implementations Debug complex issues in training pipelines and model behavior Help establish best practices for reliable, reproducible model post-training You may be a good fit if you: Thrive in controlled chaos and are energised, rather than overwhelmed, when juggling multiple urgent priorities Adapt quickly to changing priorities Maintain clarity when debugging complex, time-sensitive issues Have strong software engineering skills with experience building complex ML systems Are comfortable working with large-scale distributed systems and high-performance computing Have experience with training, fine-tuning, or evaluating large language models Can balance research exploration with engineering rigor and operational reliability Are adept at analyzing and debugging model training processes Enjoy collaborating across research and engineering disciplines Can navigate ambiguity and make progress in fast-moving research environments Strong candidates may also: Have experience with LLMs Have a keen interest in AI safety and responsible deployment We welcome candidates at various experience levels, with a preference for senior engineers who have hands-on experience with frontier AI systems. However, proficiency in Python, deep learning frameworks, and distributed computing is required for this role. 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: $350,000 — $500,000 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 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.
Requirements to meet
Disclaimer
Suggestions only — review each course yourself to judge whether it meets the role's requirements. Completing a course doesn't guarantee proficiency or that you'll qualify; hiring standards vary by employer.
Skills required
Fine-Tuning (required)
GapCourses that may help you meet this requirement:
Generative AI Advanced Fine-Tuning for LLMs
Coursera · intermediate · $49/mo · 9h · ★ 4.4
This course directly covers Fine-Tuning, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at an intermediate level and can be completed in approximately 9 hours.
Hugging Face NLP Course
Hugging Face Learn · intermediate · Free
This course directly covers Fine-Tuning, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at an intermediate level.
Optimize and fine-tune AI agents for production
Microsoft Learn · intermediate · Free · 1.5h
This intermediate course directly targets fine-tuning techniques for production AI agents, addressing the Fine-Tuning skill gap required for the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training role.
Machine Learning (required)
GapCourses that may help you meet this requirement:
Perform hyperparameter tuning with Azure Machine Learning
Microsoft Learn · beginner · Free · 46m · ★ 4.9
This course directly covers Machine Learning, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at a beginner level and can be completed in approximately 1 hours.
Introduction to DevOps principles for machine learning
Microsoft Learn · beginner · Free · 33m · ★ 4.7
This course directly covers Machine Learning, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at a beginner level and can be completed in approximately 1 hours.
Intro to Machine Learning
Kaggle Learn · beginner · Free
This course directly covers Machine Learning, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at a beginner level.
Deep Learning (required)
GapCourses that may help you meet this requirement:
Unsupervised Learning, Recommenders, Reinforcement Learning
Coursera · beginner · $49/mo · 30h · ★ 4.9
This course directly covers Deep Learning, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at a beginner level and can be completed in approximately 30 hours.
Basic Image Classification with TensorFlow
Coursera · beginner · Price on site · 2h · ★ 4.6
This course covers Deep Learning, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at a beginner level and can be completed in approximately 2 hours.
TensorFlow fundamentals
Microsoft Learn · beginner · Free · 4.5h
This beginner course covers deep learning fundamentals, directly addressing the Deep Learning skill gap required for the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training role.
Python (required)
GapCourses that may help you meet this requirement:
PySpark & Python: Hands-On Guide to Data Processing
Coursera · beginner · $49/mo · 5h · ★ 4.4
This course directly covers Python, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at a beginner level and can be completed in approximately 5 hours.
Data Analysis with Python
freeCodeCamp · beginner · Free
This course directly covers Python, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at a beginner level.
Pandas
Kaggle Learn · beginner · Free
This beginner Pandas course helps build foundational Python skills relevant to the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training role, though no specific matched keywords were identified to further justify the alignment.
Large Language Models (required)
GapCourses that may help you meet this requirement:
Leverage AI tools and resources for your business
Microsoft Learn · beginner · Free · 42m · ★ 4.8
This course covers Large Language Models, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at a beginner level and can be completed in approximately 1 hours.
Explore data roles and services
Microsoft Learn · beginner · Free · 22m · ★ 4.8
This course covers Large Language Models, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at a beginner level and can be completed in approximately 0 hours.
Use AI for everyday tasks
Microsoft Learn · beginner · Free · 43m
This beginner course introduces practical AI usage, offering a low-effort starting point to build foundational familiarity with Large Language Models needed for the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training role.
AI Safety (required)
GapCourses that may help you meet this requirement:
AI Engineering Specialization
Coursera · intermediate · $49/mo · 40h · ★ 4.5
This course directly covers AI Safety, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at an intermediate level and can be completed in approximately 40 hours.
Configure and manage guardrails in Microsoft Foundry
Microsoft Learn · intermediate · Free · 48m
This course directly covers AI Safety, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at an intermediate level and can be completed in approximately 1 hours.
Reinforcement Learning (required)
GapCourses that may help you meet this requirement:
Unsupervised Learning, Recommenders, Reinforcement Learning
Coursera · beginner · $49/mo · 30h · ★ 4.9
This course directly covers Reinforcement Learning, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at a beginner level and can be completed in approximately 30 hours.
Generative AI with Large Language Models
Coursera · intermediate · $49 · 17h · ★ 4.8
This course covers Reinforcement Learning, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at an intermediate level and can be completed in approximately 17 hours.
Generative AI Advanced Fine-Tuning for LLMs
Coursera · intermediate · $49/mo · 9h · ★ 4.4
This course covers Reinforcement Learning, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at an intermediate level and can be completed in approximately 9 hours.
Distributed Systems (required)
GapCourses that may help you meet this requirement:
Distributed Systems and Web Services
Coursera · intermediate · $49/mo · 20h
This course directly covers Distributed Systems, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at an intermediate level and can be completed in approximately 20 hours.
Principles of Computer Systems
MIT Learn · advanced · Free
This course directly covers Distributed Systems, which appears as a requirement in the Research Engineer, Production Model Post-Training posting at an advanced level.