Research Scientist, Interpretability · Anthropic

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:48:39 GMT
Engineering

Anthropic · San Francisco · $350,000 - $850,000USD · hybrid

About the role:

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 is working to reverse-engineer how trained models work because we believe that a mechanistic understanding is the most robust way to make advanced systems safe. We’re looking for researchers and engineers to join our efforts.

People mean many different things by 'interpretability'. We're focused on mechanistic interpretability, which aims to discover how neural network parameters map to meaningful algorithms. Some useful analogies might be to think of us as trying to do 'biology' or 'neuroscience' of neural networks using “microscopes” we build, or as treating neural networks as binary computer programs we're trying to 'reverse engineer'.

Responsibilities:

Develop methods for understanding LLMs by reverse engineering algorithms learned in their weights

Design and run robust experiments, both quickly in toy scenarios and at scale in large models

Create and analyse new interpretability features and circuits to better understand how models work.

Build infrastructure for running experiments and visualising results

Work with colleagues to communicate results internally and publicly

You may be a good fit if you:

Have a strong track record of scientific research (in any field), and have done _some_ work on Interpretability

Enjoy team science – working collaboratively to make big discoveries

Are comfortable with messy experimental science. We're inventing the field as we work, and the first textbook is years away

You view research and engineering as two sides of the same coin. Every team member writes code, designs and runs experiments, and interprets results

You can clearly articulate and discuss the motivations behind your work, and teach us about what you've learned. You like writing up and communicating your results, even when they're null

Role Specific Location Policy:

This role is based in San Francisco office; however, we are open to considering exceptional candidates for remote work on a case-by-case basis.

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience. 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.