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 Anthropic Fellows Program
The Anthropic Fellows Program is designed to accelerate AI safety research and foster research talent. The program provides funding and mentorship for cohorts of Fellows to work full-time on AI safety research. The program runs for approximately two months, with opportunities to extend for an additional four months based on progress and performance. Fellows are matched with Anthropic mentors to investigate research questions in areas such as Adversarial Robustness & AI Control, Scalable Oversight, Model Organisms of Misalignment, and Mechanistic Interpretability. We currently run this program on a twice-annual basis, and we aim to expand out the program or run similar efforts over time.
The program aims to expand the pool of researchers working at the frontier of AI safety by supporting engineers and researchers with strong coding or technical backgrounds in their transition into safety research. In recent months, our collaborations through Anthropic Fellows and similar programs have led to a majority of our research papers and new hires to our Alignment Science team.
About the role
As Program Lead for the Anthropic Fellows Program, you will be responsible for designing, iterating on, and scaling the program's operations while ensuring Fellows have the infrastructure and support needed to produce high-impact research. This role combines program management and operational excellence to build one of the premier pipelines for AI safety research and talent development.
You'll work closely with senior researchers and operations teams across Anthropic to identify high-impact research projects, coordinate resources, and ensure smooth program execution. This role requires both strategic vision to shape the program's future and tactical excellence to manage day-to-day operations.
Please note: We expect this role to be in-person 5 days a week in San Francisco or Berkeley, CA
Responsibilities:
Program Operations & Management
- Own end-to-end program execution including timelines, milestones, and deliverables
- Manage expense and compute tracking/approvals (~$15,000 per month per Fellow for compute and research spending)
- Set up and coordinate fellows programming, including Q&As, talks, socials, and research discussions
- Design and iterate on program structure, including performance evaluation criteria for extensions
- Track and report on program metrics and Fellow progress
Recruiting & Talent Pipeline
- Lead Fellows recruiting efforts including coordinating contractors and liaising with cross-functional stakeholders
- Develop and execute outreach strategies to attract top technical talent
- Coordinate application review and selection processes
- Work with the recruiting team to support placement of successful Fellows into full-time roles at Anthropic and other safety research organizations
Research Coordination
- Collect and curate research project proposals from Anthropic researchers
- Solicit feedback on proposals and coordinate selection of the best projects
- Match Fellows with appropriate projects and mentors based on skills and interests
- Facilitate collaboration between Fellows and with Anthropic mentors across research areas
People Support
- Directly manage a subset of Fellows when needed
- Coordinate with mentors to ensure Fellows receive appropriate technical and career guidance
- Support Fellows through research challenges and help navigate open-ended projects
- Coach Fellows through interpersonal or collaboration-related issues
Strategic Initiatives
- Lead efforts to scale the program by documenting program impact and securing buy-in for additional growth
- Support broader safety-related TPM initiatives including:
- Partner with external programs and organizations in the AI safety ecosystem for research and talent sourcing and development
What We're Looking For:
Required Qualifications
- Strong project management skills including timeline management, resource allocation, and cross-functional coordination
- Demonstrated ability to coordinate logistics for events, programs, or initiatives
- Experience in understanding AI safety research at a high level, or ability to learn to do so
- Experience in managing complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives, or ability to do so
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Preferred Qualifications
- Program management experience, preferably in research or engineering environments
- Experience with recruiting, evaluating, and placing technical talent
- Familiarity with the AI and/or AI safety research landscape and key research agendas
- Prior experience contributing to or managing projects, especially engineering or research projects
- Background in machine learning, computer science, or related technical fields
- Familiarity with machine learning infrastructure and computational research workflows
Personal Qualities
- High agency at identifying new opportunities for impact
- Strong ability to execute quickly and get stuff done
- High reliability at execution – ability to consistently understand what needs to happen and execute without errors
- Ability to handle and track a large volume of diverse tasks
- Excitement for developing research talent and advancing AI safety and Anthropic’s mission
- Strong work ethic – ability to do what needs to happen to meet tight deadlines or make ambitious goals happen
- Great interpersonal skills – ability to be the public face of the program, build relationships across diverse stakeholders, and navigate and advise on interpersonal difficulties between researchers
The expected salary range for this position is:
Annual Salary:
$210,000—$425,000 USD
Logistics
**Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.
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.
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