Research Engineer, Frontier Red Team (Hardware Lead)

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.

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

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

Benefits

• competitive compensation and benefits
• optional equity donation matching
• generous vacation and parental leave
• flexible working hours
• a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues

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