Research Engineer, Frontier Red Team (Hardware Lead)

Our belief is that hardware capabilities may come very quickly, be very powerful, and come with enormous benefits and risks. Our team is focused on understanding the shape of this frontier and its implications for AI development. How do we measure these capabilities? How will they emerge and how will models behave? How do we ensure their safety and defend against a world where powerful, autonomous, self-improving AI systems may be used adversarially? 

We're looking for a senior engineer or scientist to lead our hardware research efforts—interfacing Claude with robotics and other cyberphysical systems to understand how autonomous AI interacts with the physical world.

This is a senior individual contributor role with the opportunity to grow into team leadership as our hardware research expands. You'll own our hardware research direction, build foundational infrastructure, and shape how Anthropic thinks about cyberphysical AI risks.

This is applied research with real-world stakes. Your work will inform decisions at the highest levels of the company, contribute to public demonstrations that shape policy discourse, and help build technical defenses that could matter enormously as AI systems become more capable.

What You'll Do

• Design and build systems that interface Claude with diverse hardware platforms—robotics and other cyberphysical systems
• Develop some of the first comprehensive evals for hardware-enabled frontier models
• Build training environments for desirable model behavior
• Create demonstrations that characterize cyberphysical capabilities and inform policymakers and the public
• Collaborate with the broader team to integrate hardware capabilities into our defensive AI research
• Work with external experts in robotics, automation, and national security, to scope and validate research directions
• Own the technical roadmap for hardware research within FRT

Sample Projects

• Developing simulation stacks and training pipelines for embodied robotics
• Developing systems where Claude controls diverse hardware and robotics platforms
• Building test environments and evaluations for characterising autonomous AI behavior in physical and simulated settings
• Creating demonstrations of cyberphysical risks and defenses for policy stakeholders

• Have experience building evaluation pipelines for LLMs
• Have experience optimizing capabilities of LLMs for narrow domains
• Have deep experience with robotics or other cyberphysical systems
• Have strong software engineering skills, particularly in Python
• Have experience building and working with LLM-based agents or autonomous systems
• Are driven to find solutions to ambiguously scoped, high-stakes problems
• Design and run experiments quickly, iterating fast toward useful results
• Thrive in collaborative environments (we love pair programming!)
• Care deeply about AI safety and want your work to have real-world impact on how humanity navigates advanced AI
• Can own entire problems end-to-end, including both technical and non-technical components
• Are comfortable working on sensitive projects that require discretion and integrity

• Experience leading technical projects or small teams
• Background in controls, mechatronics, or embedded systems
• Experience with simulation environments for robotics or autonomous systems
• Track record of building demos or prototypes that communicate complex technical ideas
• Experience working with external stakeholders (policymakers, government, researchers)
• Familiarity with AI safety research and threat modeling for advanced AI systems