Applied AI Engineer, Startups (Life Sciences)
Anthropic
- Location
- Hybrid (San Francisco, California)
- Compensation
- $280k - $320k/yr
- Employment
- Full-time
- Level
- Senior Level
About the role
Anthropic is building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. This role serves as a deep technical advisor to life sciences and biotech startups, helping them integrate Claude into their products and research workflows to push the boundaries of AI in scientific discovery.
Skills
Benefits
- Generous vacation
- Parental leave
Perks
- Equity donation matching
- Flexible working hours
Full job details
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
As an Applied AI Engineer on the Startups team at Anthropic, you will be a trusted technical advisor to the top AI-native life sciences and biotech startups as they grow from early product to scale. Some of these companies build products on Claude that they sell to the rest of the industry, and others do the science themselves and want Claude woven into how their own research runs, and this role works with both. You'll lead deep technical engagements, partnering directly with startup engineering and scientific teams to help them build their products on Claude and run their own research with it, advising on implementation and agent design as they build what is newly possible with AI in the life sciences. You will bridge the gap between what Claude can do and what the life sciences need, working alongside some of the strongest teams in the field on problems that matter and pushing the boundaries of AI in science as you go.
Working closely with Applied AI Architects, Account Executives, and Anthropic's Product, Engineering, and Research teams, you'll help startups build at the edge of what is possible with Claude. You'll leverage your AI engineering expertise and your scientific domain knowledge to develop custom evaluation frameworks, design scalable architectures, and create the technical resources that enable life sciences startups to succeed with Claude.
Responsibilities
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Serve as a deep technical advisor to high-potential life sciences and biotech startups, whether Claude sits inside the product they sell or inside the way they make discoveries, working alongside them to build innovative use cases that push the boundaries of AI in scientific research and development
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Work hands-on with startup engineering teams and their scientists through pair programming and architecture reviews that accelerate their development, and understand their scientific workflows end to end so that your guidance fits into real research pipelines
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Develop prototypes and technical documentation, including evaluation suites, scientifically grounded benchmarks, AI engineering techniques, and architecture diagrams, that enable startups to build, operate, and scale with Claude
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Create reference implementations and sample code that many companies can adopt without starting from scratch, such as example MCP servers for domain-specific data sources like genomics platforms, literature databases, and experimental repositories, along with agent skills for common scientific workflows
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Collaborate closely with Applied AI Architects to maintain context and continuity across customer engagements
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Identify patterns across engagements, including what is hard about deploying AI in the life sciences such as heterogeneous data, auditability requirements, and the gap between a working prototype and a system that scientists trust, and contribute insights back to Product, Engineering, Research, and the broader Applied AI team, including feedback on the model capabilities and product features that would most accelerate discovery work
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Create technical content for startup audiences including documentation, tutorials, and sample code
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Represent Anthropic across the life sciences startup ecosystem and foster community engagement through hackathons, webinars, technical office hours, in-person founder events, and research show and tells
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Travel to customer sites for workshops, implementation guidance, and relationship building
You may be a good fit if you have
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Deep experience in the life sciences or biotech, gained through research or industry work in areas such as genomics, drug discovery, molecular design, lab automation, or clinical development, along with strong opinions of your own about how to bridge the gap between what AI can do today and what the life sciences need
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4+ years of technical experience as a software engineer, ML or research engineer, computational biologist, research scientist, or technical founder, with either production experience building LLM-powered applications, including prompting, context engineering, agent architectures, evaluation frameworks, and deployment at scale, or a track record of successfully applying AI to real scientific work in the lab or in research
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Experience with startups or high-growth companies and a love of working with founders and small teams that move quickly
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Strong technical communication skills, with the ability to translate complex AI concepts into architectural decisions and actionable implementation plans for both engineering and scientific audiences and to run technical workshops, hackathons, or developer-focused events
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A collaborative approach to working across teams, the ability to context-switch across scientific domains and use cases, and a passion for making powerful technology safe and beneficial
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.
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.
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. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.