Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Vision

New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA

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

We’re looking for research engineers with a strong computer vision background who believe that visual and spatial reasoning are core to fully unlocking the capabilities of LLMs. In this role, you'll work on research, development, and evaluation for state-of-the-art Claude models, with a focus on visual and spatial capabilities. This role is highly collaborative and will touch many aspects of our broader research efforts, taking a full-stack approach across pretraining, RL, and runtime techniques like agentic harnesses. Additionally, you’ll partner with the product org to ensure that the vision improvements you deliver impact Claude’s performance on real-world tasks.

What you'll do:

• Run experiments to evaluate architectural variants, data strategies, and SL and RL techniques to improve Claude’s vision

• Develop and test tools, skills, and agentic infrastructure that enable Claude to reason over visual inputs

• Create evaluations and benchmarks that measure progress on multimodal capabilities across training and deployment

• Work with our product org to find solutions to our most vexing API customer challenges related to vision and spatial reasoning

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 7+ years of ML, computer vision, and software engineering experience through industry, academia, or other projects

• Are familiar with the architecture, training, and operation of large vision language models

• Have experience creating and evaluating large synthetic and real-world visual training datasets

• Have experience engaging in systematic prompting, finetuning, or evaluation

• Are results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact

• Enjoy pair programming and cross-team collaboration

• Care about the societal impacts of your work

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

• Large-scale pretraining, SL, and RL on language models

• Deep learning research on images, video, or other modalities

• Developing complex agentic systems using LLMs

• High-performance ML systems (GPUs, TPUs, JAX, PyTorch)

• Large-scale ETL and data pipeline development

Representative projects:

• Running experiments to determine ideal training datamixes and parameters for a synthetically generated vision dataset

• Finetuning Claude to maximize its performance using a particular set of agent tools/skills

• Building a pipeline to ingest and process a novel source of visual training data

• Designing and running experiments to evaluate the scalability of two architectural variants

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. 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

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Anthropic’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

Race & Ethnicity Definitions

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

Form CC-305 Page 1 of 1

OMB Control Number 1250-0005 Expires 04/30/2026

Why are you being asked to complete this form?

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years.

Completing this form is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer is confidential. No one who makes hiring decisions will see it. Your decision to complete the form and your answer will not harm you in any way. If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

How do you know if you have a disability?

A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your “major life activities.” If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

• Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)

• Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS

• Blind or low vision

• Cancer (past or present)

• Cardiovascular or heart disease

• Celiac disease

• Cerebral palsy

• Deaf or serious difficulty hearing

• Diabetes

• Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders

• Epilepsy or other seizure disorder

• Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome

• Intellectual or developmental disability

• Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD

• Missing limbs or partially missing limbs

• Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports

• Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)

• Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities

• Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)

• Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema

• Short stature (dwarfism)

• Traumatic brain injury

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.