Research/Engineer Scientist, CBRN (Bio/Chem)

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

Safeguards, Dangerous Asymmetric Harms is a team responsible for developing comprehensive safety systems and policy boundaries across CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive), Cyber, and Dangerous Asymmetric Advanced Technologies—addressing threats from everyday trust and safety risks to catastrophic AI scenarios. We blend domain expertise in CBRNE and Cyber with ML engineering to create classifiers, evaluation infrastructure, threat models, and conduct RL experiments. The team also performs AI capability uplift testing through partnerships with government laboratories and private industry, leveraging real-world cross-functional experience.

We are looking for a Research Scientist, CBRN (Bio/Chem), ML Systems, who can execute rapidly, maintain high throughput, and bring a strong builder mindset to solving complex problems. The ideal candidate will combine deep biological/chemical domain expertise with advanced ML capabilities to build systems that evaluate and prevent dangerous capability development. You'll be designing novel approaches to detect threats that span from traditional biological weapons to AI-enabled synthetic biology risks, requiring both technical sophistication and creative problem-solving.

This role is primarily focused building advanced ML systems x Biological and Chemical Weapons. You will use your deep technical expertise to inform ML solutions that prevent real world harm.

Responsibilities:

• Apply ML/AI research to build evaluation systems for biological and chemical safety, with focus on pathogen characterization and threat detection
• Design and train specialized AI models for biological agent classification, leveraging genomic data, literature analysis, and experimental protocols
• Work with SG research to design and implement state-of-the-art ML approaches for identifying dual-use research and gain-of-function experiments
• Build systems that target the transition of digital biological information into laboratory implementation, preventing malicious synthesis
• Create and implement technical systems for monitoring emerging biological and chemical threats
• Develop classifiers that can distinguish between legitimate research and potential biological weapons development
• Build sophisticated evaluation infrastructure for measuring AI capability uplift in biological and chemical domains
• Design adversarial testing frameworks that probe model capabilities in biosecurity contexts
• Integrate wet lab validation data with ML training pipelines to improve classifier accuracy
• Develop and maintain biological threat datasets and benchmarks while ensuring appropriate information security
• Create tools that allow biodefense experts to quickly develop and deploy new threat detection evaluations
• Write production-quality Python code for high-throughput biological data processing and evaluation systems
• Contribute to biological risk assessments that directly inform AI model release decisions and policy development
• Work cross-functionally with biodefense policy experts, laboratory researchers, and ML engineering teams

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have deep domain expertise in biological sciences, particularly in pathogen research, molecular biology, biodefense, chemical engineering, or chemical weapons counterproliferation 
• Possess experience with coronavirus or other high-consequence pathogen research, including reverse genetics systems
• Have worked with biological and chemical threat characterization, risk assessment, or biosecurity policy development
• Demonstrate experience in applying ML to biological problems, such as genomic analysis or literature mining
• Have familiarity with the Biological Weapons Convention and dual-use research oversight frameworks
• Possess experience with BSL-3/ABSL-3 facilities or Federal Select Agent Program compliance
• Can bridge technical biological knowledge with ML/AI applications for security purposes
• Have experience fine-tuning large language models for specialized domains
• Understand the intersection of converging technologies (AI, synthetic biology, gene editing) and biosecurity risks
• Possess strong foundation in both molecular biology techniques and modern ML frameworks (PyTorch/TensorFlow)
• Have experience translating complex technical findings into policy recommendations
• Demonstrate ability to work with sensitive information while maintaining appropriate security protocols
• Show experience with government biodefense programs or national security applications
• Can operate effectively in fast-paced environments while maintaining scientific rigor
• Have published research in relevant biological or biosecurity domains

Do not rule yourself out if you do not fit every qualification - we recognize that the intersection of advanced biology and ML for security applications is a rare combination. If you have deep expertise in biological threats and are eager to apply ML to prevent catastrophic risks, please consider applying.

What makes this role unique

• Mission-critical impact: Your work will directly prevent the development and proliferation of biological and chemical weapons
• Unique technical intersection: Combine cutting-edge ML with deep biological domain expertise in ways that have never been done before
• Cross-domain innovation: Apply lessons from traditional biodefense to emerging AI threats while pioneering new approaches
• Real-world validation: Collaborate with government laboratories and biodefense agencies to ensure practical applicability

Dual-use navigation: Balance the advancement of beneficial biotechnology with the prevention of malicious applications

The expected salary range for this position is:

Annual Salary:$280,000—$340,000 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.

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.