Research Scientist, Life Sciences

Anthropic seeks a Research Scientist to join its Life Sciences team, focusing on enhancing Claude's capabilities as a biological research assistant. The role bridges machine learning, software engineering, and biology, with emphasis on post-training, evaluation frameworks, and reinforcement learning environments. The position aims to establish Anthropic as a leader in AI-accelerated biology while shaping how frontier models reason about and execute computational biology tasks.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop agentic tools enabling Claude to execute bioinformatics pipelines, database queries, and literature reviews
• Design evaluation benchmarks measuring model performance on biological tasks including figure interpretation, bioinformatics, protocol reasoning, and literature synthesis
• Collaborate with product and design teams on feature scoping and shipping
• Partner with external biotech, pharma, and academic users to gather feedback
• Build engineering infrastructure supporting biology product features
• Translate domain expertise into product requirements guiding model improvement

Minimum Qualifications

• ML/software engineering experience in computational biology, bioinformatics, protein modeling, or genomics
• Background in drug discovery at biotech/pharma or fundamental academic research
• Strong Python proficiency and production-quality codebase experience
• Hands-on model training/fine-tuning experience (LLMs or deep learning)
• Track record shipping computational tools biologists actively use

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years applying ML to biological problems
• Ph.D. in computational biology, bioinformatics, or related quantitative field
• LLM post-training experience (RLHF, RL, SFT curation)
• Therapeutic discovery pipeline familiarity
• Bioinformatics tooling expertise (UniProt, PDB, Ensembl, NCBI)
• Agentic systems experience

Salary: $300,000 - $320,000 annually. Location: San Francisco, CA (on-site).