Research Engineer, RL Infrastructure (knowledge Work)

Anthropic Anthropic · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · AI Research & Engineering

Research Engineer focused on the reliability, observability, and infrastructure of training environments and evaluation systems for AI models, ensuring stability and quality as they scale. The role involves proactive hardening, building tooling for early problem detection, and serving as a dedicated owner for environment health and evaluation integrity.

What you'd actually do

  1. Serve as the dedicated reliability owner for the Knowledge Work training environments, providing continuity of context and reducing the operational overhead of rotating ownership
  2. Own a clean, canonical set of evaluation tools and processes for Knowledge Work capabilities, including the process used for model releases
  3. Build and automate observability, dashboards, and operational tooling for our training environments and evaluation systems, with an emphasis on high signal-to-noise: a small set of trusted metrics and alerts rather than sprawling instrumentation
  4. Proactively harden environments and evaluation systems through load testing, fault injection, and stress testing at realistic scale, so failures surface early rather than during critical training work
  5. Act as the primary point of contact for partner training and infrastructure teams when issues in our environments arise, and drive incidents to resolution

Skills

Required

  • Python
  • ML systems operation
  • distributed systems operation
  • on-call experience
  • incident response
  • SRE
  • production engineering
  • ML fundamentals
  • reading research code

Nice to have

  • 5+ years of experience operating ML or distributed systems at scale
  • RL environments
  • agent harnesses
  • LLM evaluation frameworks
  • reward modeling
  • evaluation design
  • reward hacking detection/mitigation
  • observability stacks (metrics, tracing, structured logging)
  • operational dashboard tooling
  • chaos engineering
  • fault injection
  • large-scale load testing
  • data quality pipelines
  • drift detection
  • evaluation-set curation and versioning
  • large-scale training infrastructure
  • inference infrastructure
  • multi-agent orchestration
  • sandboxed execution
  • dedicated reliability/operations owner embedded within a research team

What the JD emphasized

  • highly experienced Python engineer who ships reliable, well-instrumented code that teammates trust in production
  • demonstrated experience operating ML or distributed systems at scale, including significant on-call and incident-response experience
  • strong SRE or production-engineering mindset — reaching for SLOs, load tests, and failure injection before reaching for more dashboards
  • foundational ML knowledge sufficient to understand what a training environment or evaluation is actually measuring, and recognize when an evaluation has become stale or gameable
  • able to read research code and reason evaluation integrity
  • experience building or operating RL environments, agent harnesses, or LLM evaluation frameworks
  • familiarity with reward modeling, evaluation design, or detecting and mitigating reward hacking
  • experience with bservability stacks (metrics, tracing, structured logging) and operational dashboard tooling
  • background in chaos engineering, fault injection, or large-scale load testing
  • experience with data quality pipelines, drift detection, or evaluation-set curation and versioning
  • familiarity with large-scale training or inference infrastructure (schedulers, multi-agent orchestration, sandboxed execution)
  • prior experience as a dedicated reliability or operations owner embedded within a research team

Other signals

  • reliability
  • observability
  • infrastructure
  • evaluation
  • training environments