Research Operations, Reinforcement Learning

San Francisco, CA

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

Frontier research runs on more than research alone. Behind every model launch, review, and cross-team program is a web of decisions, priorities, and follow-through that keeps hundreds of researchers moving in the same direction. Research Operations owns that work: we bring clarity to ambiguity, provide stability during change, and continually deepen our domain knowledge so that researchers can spend their time on the problems only they can solve. It is one of the highest-leverage functions at Anthropic.

We are hiring an experienced operator to embed with the leadership of our reinforcement learning (RL) organization, the team responsible for training Claude to be more capable, more reliable, and more aligned. You will shape what leadership spends its time on, make sure priority decisions reach the right decision-makers and get made quickly, and clear the path so leaders can focus on the work that matters most. You will report to the Manager of Research Operations and work daily with RL org leaders and their teams.

Key responsibilities

• Own leadership's time. Shape the week around the leaders' specific, most timely priorities, set agendas so meetings are spent on decisions that move the org forward, and cut what isn't critical so leaders stay focused on the areas that are highest-leverage for them.

• Triage what reaches leadership. Resolve what you can, route what belongs elsewhere, and thoughtfully escalate the rest.

• Enable wise decision-making and follow through. Give leaders what they need to decide quickly, communicate those decisions to collaborators, and track commitments through to completion.

• See problems coming. Surface resourcing gaps, technical bottlenecks, and stalled action-items before they become blockers.

• Scale leadership voice. Meetings are ephemeral; docs are forever. Draft materials for org-wide announcements, programming, and planning sessions. Protect leadership’s time for creating durable comms that set direction in turbulent times.

• Make the org run better. Find the friction that keeps recurring and find the people who can fix the process behind it.

• Be a thought partner. Offer honest, candid counsel to leaders, including crisp and kind disagreement.

Minimum qualifications

• Care deeply about Anthropic's mission and let it underpin all judgment calls you make across the org.

• Technical fluency to engage substantively with researchers: you can follow a discussion about an RL training run, read a set of eval results and form reasonable hypotheses about what they mean, and hold your own in a technical conversation. You don't need to have trained a model yourself, but you should understand the model training process and have the depth to work closely with leading researchers.

• Clear writing: you turn dense, jargon-heavy material into summaries and plans that technical collaborators across the RL org and beyond can act on

• An eye for great dashboards: you can look at data visualizations and scope improvements that make lessons at-a-glance clearer and grounded.

• Strong follow-through and attention to detail; nothing falls through the cracks on your watch.

• Ability to push back on senior stakeholders to offer strategic guidance as needed, disagree without causing discord, and influence without direct authority.

• Comfort with ambiguity and a fast-changing environment; you stay steady when the pace is relentless and the stakes are as high as they can possibly be.

• Experience in an operations, chief of staff, program management, or comparable role supporting senior leaders in a fast-moving technical organization

• High integrity. This role sits close to decisions that execute on Anthropic’s mission, and you care about getting them right.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience supporting a senior leader directly in a chief of staff or related function

• Time in a research institution, lab, or other research-heavy organization

• Track record of anticipating what colleagues and leaders will need and acting on it before being asked

• Comfort in an environment where the right answer changes hour to hour

• Experience moving routine operational work to AI agents, or the ability to script and build small tools

• Familiarity with AI safety or other existential risks.

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.