Anthropic Research Resident

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.

The Anthropic Residency is our paid, fixed-term research program, with placements lasting between six weeks and six months. We are looking for people who have led ambitious work in a variety of technical fields and want to transition to full-time work focused on making sure AI systems are safe and beneficial for all of humanity. If you are a professor in a quantitative discipline, a technical founder or a staff-level engineer and want to transition to work on transformative AI, we want to hear from you. Background in machine learning is not required.

What to expect

Interview process

The interview process will include an initial application, recruiter screen, technical assessment, research discussion and a reference check.

Applications for this round close on November 22, 2026 (11:59 PM PT). We expect to make offers in January 2027.

You may be a good fit if you

Strong candidates may also

Mentors and research areas

• A concrete, scoped project matched to your background, with direct mentorship from Anthropic researchers
• Access to Claude models and GPU compute
• Connection to the broader AI safety and security research community
• Are motivated by making sure AI is safe and beneficial for society as a whole
• Are excited to transition into working on empirical AI research full-time
• Have led ambitious work in a variety of technical fields (professor in a quantitative discipline, a technical founder or a staff-level engineer)
• Thrive in fast-paced, collaborative environments
• Can implement ideas quickly and communicate clearly
• Have experience authoring research papers in machine learning, NLP, or AI safety
• Have experience with LLMs, reinforcement learning or Kubernetes clusters and complex shared codebases

Residents will work on empirical research questions in collaboration with Anthropic's research teams. Areas we are particularly interested in include:

AI safety & alignment

AI security & frontier red-teaming

ML systems & reinforcement learning

For a fuller picture of the questions we care about, see our Recommendations for Technical AI Safety Research Directions and recent publications from our Alignment, Interpretability and Frontier Red teams.

Logistics

Applicants may also be considered for the Anthropic Fellows Program. The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

• Sara Price: leads the Alignment Training team; background in data science
• Ethan Perez: leads the Alignment Science team; background in machine learning

$350,000—$500,000 USD

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.