Research Engineer, Frontier Red Team (Autonomy)

Anthropic•San Francisco, CA

6d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Frontier Red Team (FRT) is a small, focused technical research team within Anthropic's Policy organization. Our goal is to make the entire world safer in this era of advanced AI by understanding what these systems can do and building the defenses that matter. In 2026, we're focused on researching and ensuring safety with self-improving, highly autonomous AI systems—especially ones with cyberphysical capabilities. See our previous related work on cyberdefense, robotics, and Project Vend. This is early-stage, high-conviction research with the potential for outsized impact. Our team is focused on a critical question: how do we defend against a world where powerful, autonomous, self-improving AI systems may be used adversarially? As a Research Engineer on our team, you'll build and eval model organisms of autonomous systems and develop the defensive agents needed to counter them. This work sits at the intersection of AI capabilities research, security, and policy—what we learn directly shapes how Anthropic and the world prepare for advanced AI. This is applied research with real-world stakes. Your work will inform decisions at the highest levels of the company, contribute to public demonstrations that shape policy discourse, and help build technical defenses that could matter enormously as AI systems become more capable.

Requirements

Have strong software engineering skills, particularly in Python
Have experience building and working with LLM-based agents or autonomous systems
Are driven to find solutions to ambiguously scoped, high-stakes problems
Design and run experiments quickly, iterating fast toward useful results
Thrive in collaborative environments (we love pair programming!)
Care deeply about AI safety and want your work to have real-world impact on how humanity navigates advanced AI
Can own entire problems end-to-end, including both technical and non-technical components
Are comfortable working on sensitive projects that require discretion and integrity
We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience with reinforcement learning, self-play, or multi-agent systems
Experience with robotics, hardware interfaces, or cyberphysical systems
Track record of building demos or prototypes that communicate complex technical ideas
Experience working with external stakeholders (policymakers, government, researchers)
Familiarity with AI safety research and threat modeling for advanced AI systems

Responsibilities

Design and build autonomous AI systems that can use tools and operate across diverse environments—creating model organisms that help us understand and defend against advanced adversarial AI
Create evals and training environments to understand and shape agent behavior in desirable ways
Develop defensive agents that can detect, disrupt, or outcompete adversarial AI systems in realistic scenarios
Interface Claude with hardware platforms (e.g. robotics, physical systems) to understand cyberphysical risks and defenses
Translate technical findings into compelling demonstrations and artifacts that inform policymakers and the public
Collaborate with external experts in cybersecurity, national security, and AI safety to scope and validate research directions