What are the responsibilities and job description for the Software Engineer, Anthropic Labs position at Anthropic?
About the role:
At Anthropic, we believe new AI capabilities are best achieved through secure foundations, not in spite of them. As capabilities grow more advanced, it is critical that progress moves forward safely and for the benefit of all society. It is the reason why security sits at the center of our work, and not as an afterthought.
Anthropic Labs is seeking versatile and collaborative Software Engineers to rapidly prototype and evaluate emerging AI capabilities from our research teams. As part of the Labs team, you will work closely with researchers to validate the feasibility and product potential of cutting-edge AI breakthroughs, build lightweight demos, and generate learnings to inform Anthropic's product roadmap.
About Anthropic Labs:
Anthropic Labs serves as an internal accelerator tasked with bridging the gap between research and product development. Our mandate is to identify paradigm-shifting opportunities from research that could ship as products in a 6-12 month timeframe. We embed with research teams to provide product perspective, build prototypes, and pressure test assumptions. Successful projects will transition to product teams for launch.
Responsibilities:
- Design and execute rapid experiments to test hypotheses about emerging AI capabilities, with a focus on minimal viable testing approaches
- Balance creative exploration of possibilities with rigorous evaluation of feasibility and impact
- Build functional prototypes that demonstrate both technical viability and product potential
- Develop and refine prompting strategies to effectively leverage large language models
- Generate documentation to streamline hand-off to product teams
- Advocate for product and usability considerations early in the research process
- Flexibly contribute to a range of Labs initiatives based on organizational priorities
You may be a good fit if you:
- Have 5 years of software engineering industry experience
- Have strong technical skills across the stack and enjoy working on a variety of projects
- Are results-oriented and maintain a user-centric approach to research
- Communicate and collaborate effectively with research teams
- Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
- Have experience designing and running structured experiments to validate technical and product hypotheses
- Can balance divergent thinking (exploring possibilities) with convergent thinking (evaluating feasibility)
- Have hands-on experience working with large language models and prompt engineering
- Are comfortable with ambiguity and can devise clear testing approaches to reduce uncertainty
- Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work
Strong candidates may also:
- Building lightweight product prototypes and demos
- Working with large language models and related AI architectures
- Designing user flows, wireframes, or UI/UX for AI-powered applications
- Conducting user research, interviews, and usability testing
Candidates need not have:
- 100% of the skills needed to perform the job
- Formal certifications or education credentials
Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
