Research Scientist, Life Sciences (computational)

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

Research Scientist role focused on computational biology, combining deep expertise with frontier AI capabilities to accelerate scientific discovery. Responsibilities include building and maintaining analysis pipelines for large-scale biological data, designing experiments, generating hypotheses, standing up computational infrastructure, and heavily using LLMs and agent frameworks. The role aims to establish how computational biology operates at Anthropic and guide the development of AI systems for biological research.

What you'd actually do

  1. Build, run, and maintain the analysis pipelines that back the team's experimental programs: sequence analysis at petabyte scale, structural bioinformatics, phylogenetic and comparative genomics, design and analysis of high-throughput functional screens, biological sequence modeling, etc.
  2. Partner directly with experimental biologists to design experiments that produce high-quality data, and turn results around fast enough to immediately inform the next experiment
  3. Draw on the literature and curated biological knowledge bases alongside primary data to generate and prioritize hypotheses for experimental follow-up
  4. Stand up and maintain the team's computational infrastructure: data ingestion, workflow orchestration, internal databases, and the interfaces that make all of it accessible to both researchers and AI agents
  5. Use Claude and our internal agent frameworks heavily in your own work, and feed what you learn back to the model-improvement and product teams as evaluations, datasets, and concrete failure cases

Skills

Required

  • PhD in computational biology, bioinformatics, genomics, biophysics, machine learning, computer science, or a related quantitative or biological field, or equivalent industry research experience
  • track record of computational biology research you have led end to end, from question to result, with evidence of impact
  • demonstrated breadth across multiple areas of computational biology
  • proficient in one or more programming languages used in scientific computing
  • comfortable working on large datasets in Linux and cloud compute environments
  • Can take an ambiguous biological question, scope the analysis, and produce a result an experimentalist can act on
  • Communicate computational results clearly to both biologists and ML researchers

Nice to have

  • comfortable navigating ambiguity and developing solutions in rapidly evolving research environments
  • results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
  • Hands-on experience in experimental biology, or a track record of designing experiments side by side with experimentalists
  • Experience building tools, pipelines, or agentic systems on top of LLMs, or training models on biological sequence data
  • Deep expertise in one or two areas of computational biology (for example structural biology, metagenomics, single-cell genomics, or protein design) on top of the required breadth

What the JD emphasized

  • track record of computational biology research you have led end to end, from question to result, with evidence of impact (for example publications, preprints, released datasets or tools, or research that changed a program's direction)
  • demonstrated breadth across multiple areas of computational biology
  • Can take an ambiguous biological question, scope the analysis, and produce a result an experimentalist can act on
  • Experience building tools, pipelines, or agentic systems on top of LLMs, or training models on biological sequence data

Other signals

  • building novel AI systems
  • AI-accelerated scientific discovery
  • computational biology expertise
  • frontier AI capabilities
  • AI-driven scientific discovery
  • computational biology
  • biological data analysis
  • biological sequence modeling
  • biological knowledge bases
  • computational infrastructure
  • data ingestion
  • workflow orchestration
  • internal databases
  • Claude
  • agent frameworks
  • model improvement
  • evaluations
  • datasets
  • failure cases
  • petabyte scale sequence analysis
  • structural bioinformatics
  • phylogenetic and comparative genomics
  • high-throughput functional screens
  • biological sequence modeling
  • LLMs
  • biological sequence data