Research Engineer, Frontier Red Team (Hardware Lead)

Anthropic•San Francisco, CA

6d•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 the Team 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. About the Role Our belief is that hardware capabilities may come very quickly, be very powerful, and come with enormous benefits and risks. Our team is focused on understanding the shape of this frontier and its implications for AI development. How do we measure these capabilities? How will they emerge and how will models behave? How do we ensure their safety and defend against a world where powerful, autonomous, self-improving AI systems may be used adversarially? We're looking for a senior engineer or scientist to lead our hardware research efforts—interfacing Claude with robotics and other cyberphysical systems to understand how autonomous AI interacts with the physical world. This is a senior individual contributor role with the opportunity to grow into team leadership as our hardware research expands. You'll own our hardware research direction, build foundational infrastructure, and shape how Anthropic thinks about cyberphysical AI risks. 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 deep experience with robotics or other cyberphysical systems
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 leading technical projects or small teams
Background in controls, mechatronics, or embedded systems
Experience with simulation environments for robotics or autonomous 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 systems that interface Claude with diverse hardware platforms—robotics and other cyberphysical systems
Develop some of the first comprehensive evals for hardware-enabled frontier models
Build training environments for desirable model behavior
Create demonstrations that characterize cyberphysical capabilities and inform policymakers and the public
Collaborate with the broader team to integrate hardware capabilities into our defensive AI research
Work with external experts in robotics, automation, and national security, to scope and validate research directions
Own the technical roadmap for hardware research within FRT