Applied AI Engineer, Life Sciences (Beneficial Deployments)

Anthropic • San Francisco, CA

14d • $1 - $2 • Hybrid

About The Position

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 Beneficial Deployments:
Beneficial Deployments ensures AI reaches and benefits the communities that need it most. We partner with nonprofits, foundations, and mission-driven organizations to deploy Claude in education, global health, economic mobility, and life sciences — focusing on raising the floor for those who need it most.
About the Role:
We're looking for an Applied AI Engineer to join our Beneficial Deployments team, focused on maximizing the impact of Claude in the life sciences. Our goal is ambitious: accelerate scientific progress from R&D through translation by an order of magnitude. That means making Claude the go-to tool for the life sciences ecosystem from early discovery in academia to paradigm shifting biotech to reimaging pharma pipelines — and building the technical infrastructure to back that up.
You'll work directly with flagship research partners like Howard Hughes Medical Institute and The Allen Institute, embedded in their scientific workflows. This isn't consulting from the outside — you'll be building alongside their engineers, prototyping agents that fit into real research pipelines, and developing the ecosystem-level tooling (MCP servers, benchmarks, reusable agent skills) that extends Claude's usefulness across the broader life sciences community. This role will be part of the founding Beneficial Deployments applied AI team focused on bringing more of life sciences closer to the frontier and be responsible for building with our partners.

Requirements

• 4+ years as a Software Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, or technical founder — with production experience shipping systems that real users depend on.
• Deep experience building LLM-powered applications: prompting, context engineering, agent architectures, evaluation frameworks, deployment at scale. You've debugged evals at 2am and you know what it takes to get from "works in the notebook" to "works in production."
• Meaningful exposure to life sciences, biomedical research, or scientific computing. Enough to understand why a researcher might be skeptical of an AI system, what it means for a workflow to be scientifically rigorous, and where automation genuinely helps vs. where it introduces risk.
• The ability to work across the scientific stack — read a methods paper critically, think through evaluation design for domain-specific tasks, and reason about the difference between "this is technically impressive" and "this actually advances the science."
• Builder credibility that earns trust with research engineers and scientists. You've shipped products and can speak from experience, not slides.
• A scrappy founder mentality — comfortable wearing multiple hats, building from scratch, and driving clarity in ambiguous situations. You care about getting the science right, not just the code.

Nice To Haves

• Bonus if you've worked in genomics, neuroscience, or drug discovery.

Responsibilities

• Work as a deep technical partner to flagship life sciences research institutions — understanding their scientific workflows end to end, then advising on where AI can meaningfully accelerate discovery. This means conversations with both PIs and engineering teams, and the ability to hold your own in both.
• Build hands-on with partner engineering teams. Pair program, prototype, contribute code.
• Help a research team go from "we think Claude could help with our analysis pipeline" to a production system that's actually integrated into how they do science.
• Develop the ecosystem infrastructure that makes Claude useful across life sciences broadly — MCP servers connecting Claude to domain-specific data sources (genomics platforms, literature databases, experimental repositories), instruments, benchmarks grounded in real scientific tasks, and reusable agent skills that other institutions can adopt without starting from scratch.
• Help design and evaluate agentic scientific workflows — the kind of systems where Claude isn't just answering questions but actively contributing to experimental design, analysis, and interpretation.
• Identify what's actually hard about deploying AI in life sciences — the heterogeneous data, the need for auditability, the gap between a promising prototype and something a researcher will trust — and feed those findings back to product, engineering, and research to make the platform better.
• Create technical content and documentation that lets life sciences partners self-serve. If you build something that works at for one partner, we want it to work for institutes and scientists around the world, without requiring the same level of hand-holding.

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level