Software Engineer, Safeguards Evals

Anthropic Anthropic · AI Frontier · New York, NY +2 · Safeguards (Trust & Safety)

Software Engineer role focused on building and owning the evaluation infrastructure for an agentic investigation system. This involves designing experiments, constructing high-quality eval datasets, measuring agent performance, analyzing coverage gaps, and productionizing research into release pipelines. The role also involves building tooling for policy experts and constructing RL environments to improve safety investigation capabilities.

What you'd actually do

  1. Build and own the evaluation harness for an agentic investigation system — defining metrics, test cases and grading approaches for a complex long horizon agent
  2. Construct high-quality eval datasets representing real-world misuse across harm areas (e.g., cyber attacks, bio weapons, influence operations), drawing from real traffic patterns and synthetic generation
  3. Measure agent performance end-to-end (detection precision/recall, investigation quality, robustness) and drive hill-climbing on the hardest harm areas
  4. Analyze coverage to identify measurement gaps, and evolve evals so they remain unsaturated and high-signal as agent capabilities advance
  5. Productionize successful research into regression and release pipelines that run on every agent change, prompt update, and underlying model upgrade

Skills

Required

  • Proficiency in Python and comfort working across the stack
  • Experience building and maintaining data pipelines
  • Experience working with LLMs and a working understanding of their capabilities and failure modes — especially agentic systems with tool use and multi-step reasoning
  • Strong data analysis skills — you can draw reliable insights from large datasets
  • Ability to move fluidly between research prototyping and production-quality code
  • Ability to translate ambiguous problems into concrete, testable experiments

Nice to have

  • 6+ years of industry software engineering experience
  • Expertise in building or contributing to agent evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, or automated grading systems
  • Extensive experience in trust and safety, content moderation, or abuse detection systems
  • Experience in red teaming, adversarial testing, or jailbreak research on AI systems
  • Experience with synthetic data generation or data augmentation
  • Experience with distributed systems or large-scale data processing
  • Experience with prompt engineering or building LLM-powered applications

What the JD emphasized

  • agentic investigation system
  • agent performance
  • eval datasets
  • agent capabilities
  • agent change
  • LLMs and a working understanding of their capabilities and failure modes — especially agentic systems with tool use and multi-step reasoning
  • agent evaluation frameworks

Other signals

  • building evaluation infrastructure
  • designing experiments to measure agent performance
  • building datasets representing real abuse
  • shipping methods into pipelines that gate system changes
  • productionizing research into regression and release pipelines