Software Engineer

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 are looking for a Software Engineer to lead the “Tokens: Data Acquisition” team, which owns the problem of acquiring all of the available data on the internet through a large scale web crawler, and through data partnerships. Most of Anthropic’s research and product builds on top of the best pretrained models that we can produce, which in turn rely on having the best pretraining data. Successfully scaling our data corpus is critical to our continued efforts at producing the best pretrained models.

The team’s responsibilities are as follows:

1. Develop and maintain an internet scale web crawler responsible for crawling for accessible internet data
2. Build required pipelines to quickly ingest data from potential partners for data quality assessments or from other sources
3. Build a set of 1-off deep crawlers to improve recall for data from especially beneficial sources

Responsibilities:

• Develop and maintain our large-scale web crawler
• Build pipelines for data ingestion, analysis, and quality improvement
• Build specialized crawlers for high-value data sources
• Build tools for improving the observability and debuggability of crawler system
• Collaborate with team members on improving data acquisition processes
• Participate in code reviews and debugging sessions

You may be a good fit if you:

• Believe that advanced AI systems could have a transformative effect on the world, and are interested in helping make sure that transformation goes well
• Are interested in building a large scale system to acquire all openly accessible information on the internet

Strong candidates may also:

• Extensive experience with building and running large distributed systems
• Familiarity with the non-technical tradeoffs of internet-scale crawling (data privacy, robots.txt adherence, etc.)
• Technical expertise: Quickly understanding systems design tradeoffs, keeping track of rapidly evolving software systems
• Familiarity with Cloud-based compute and storage solutions
• Familiarity with Python

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

The expected salary range for this position is:

Annual Salary:

$280,000—$625,000 USD

Logistics

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.

Compensation and Benefits*

Anthropic’s compensation package consists of three elements: salary, equity, and benefits. We are committed to pay fairness and aim for these three elements collectively to be highly competitive with market rates.

Equity - For eligible roles, equity will be a major component of the total compensation. We aim to offer higher-than-average equity compensation for a company of our size, and communicate equity amounts at the time of offer issuance.

US Benefits - The following benefits are for our US-based employees:

• Optional equity donation matching.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and all your dependents.
• 401(k) plan with 4% matching.
• 22 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Unlimited PTO – most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more!
• Stipends for education, home office improvements, commuting, and wellness.
• Fertility benefits via Carrot.
• Daily lunches and snacks in our office.
• Relocation support for those moving to the Bay Area.

UK Benefits - The following benefits are for our UK-based employees:

• Optional equity donation matching.
• Private health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents.
• Pension contribution (matching 4% of your salary).
• 21 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Unlimited PTO – most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more!
• Health cash plan.
• Life insurance and income protection.
• Daily lunches and snacks in our office.

* This compensation and benefits information is based on Anthropic’s good faith estimate for this position as of the date of publication and may be modified in the future. Employees based outside of the UK or US will receive a different benefits package. The level of pay within the range will depend on a variety of job-related factors, including where you place on our internal performance ladders, which is based on factors including past work experience, relevant education, and performance on our interviews or in a work trial.

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.