Research Engineer, Cybersecurity Reinforcement Learning

Research Engineer, Cybersecurity Reinforcement Learning

At Anthropic, our mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We are dedicated to ensuring AI is safe and beneficial for both our users and society. Our team is a rapidly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders collaborating to build beneficial AI systems.

The Horizons team leads Anthropic's reinforcement learning (RL) research and development, playing a critical role in advancing our AI systems. We have significantly contributed to every Claude release, impacting the autonomy, coding, and reasoning capabilities of Anthropic's models.

We are hiring for the Cybersecurity RL team within Horizons. As a Research Engineer, Cybersecurity Reinforcement Learning, you will help safely advance the capabilities of our models in secure coding, vulnerability remediation, and other areas of defensive cybersecurity.

This role blends research and engineering, requiring you to both develop novel approaches and realize them in code. Your work will involve designing and implementing RL environments, conducting experiments and evaluations, delivering your work into production training runs, and collaborating with other researchers, engineers, and cybersecurity specialists across and outside Anthropic.

The role demands domain expertise in cybersecurity paired with interest or experience in training safe AI models. For example, you might be a white hat hacker curious about how LLMs could augment your work, a security engineer interested in how AI could help harden systems at scale, or a detection and response professional wondering how models could enhance defensive workflows.

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Have experience in cybersecurity research.
• Have experience with machine learning.
• Have strong software engineering skills.
• Can balance research exploration with engineering implementation.
• Are passionate about AI's potential and committed to developing safe and beneficial systems.

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Professional experience in security engineering, fuzzing, detection and response, or other applied defensive work.
• Experience participating in or building CTF competitions and cyber ranges.
• Academic research experience in cybersecurity.
• Familiarity with RL techniques and environments.
• Familiarity with LLM training methodologies.

Annual Salary

The annual compensation range for this role is $300,000—$405,000 USD.

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. 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

Key skills/competency

• Cybersecurity Research
• Machine Learning
• Software Engineering
• Reinforcement Learning
• Secure Coding
• Vulnerability Remediation
• AI Safety
• Experimentation & Evaluation
• LLM Training
• Defensive Cybersecurity