Anthropic· AI Research & Engineering· Remote-Friendly (Travel-Required) | San Francisco, CA | Seattle, WA | New York City, NY
Research Engineer, Reward Models Platform
Classified Tasks (19)
Automate 0%Augment 84%Human-Only 16%
Augment (16)
AI assists, human decides
Design and build infrastructure that enables researchers to rapidly iterate on reward signals, including tools for rubric development, human feedback data analysis, and reward robustness evaluation
technical
Develop systems for automated quality assessment of rewards, including detection of reward hacks and other pathologies
technical
Create tooling to allow researchers to compare different reward methodologies (preference models, rubrics, programmatic rewards) and analyze their effects
technical
Build pipelines and workflows to reduce toil in reward development, covering dataset preparation, evaluation, and deployment
technical
Implement monitoring and observability systems to track reward signal quality and surface issues during training runs
technical
Optimize existing systems for performance, reliability, and ease of use
technical
Contribute to the development of best practices and documentation for reward development workflows
communication
Analyze research workflows of Finetuning teams and automate high-friction experimental steps to shorten experimentation time
analytical
Build systems that accelerate researcher workflows by an order of magnitude (10x)
technical
Craft and evaluate rubrics for reward development
analytical
Analyze the effects of human feedback data on reward models
analytical
Detect and mitigate reward hacks and other reward pathologies
analytical
Enable experimentation with different reward methodologies and assess their robustness
analytical
Iterate rapidly on improvements to reward models to support training across domains
technical
Develop automated tools for running human data experiments prior to integrating results into preference models
technical
Debug reward implementation issues and reward-related failures
technical
Human-Only (3)
Requires human judgment
Collaborate with researchers to translate science requirements into platform capabilities
communication
Partner with Rewards and Fine-Tuning researchers to identify bottlenecks such as running human data experiments, debugging reward hacks, and comparing rubric methodologies across domains
communication
Contribute directly to research projects when bandwidth allows
analytical
Job description
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 role You will deeply understand the research workflows of our Finetuning teams and automate the high-friction parts – turning days of manual experimentation into hours. You’ll build the tools and infrastructure that enable researchers across the organization to develop, evaluate, and optimize reward signals for training our models. Your scalable platforms will make it easy to experiment with different reward methodologies, assess their robustness, and iterate rapidly on improvements to help the rest of Anthropic train our reward models. This is a role for someone who wants to stay close to the science while having outsized leverage. You'll partner directly with researchers on the Rewards team and across the broader Fine-Tuning organization to understand what slows them down: running human data experiments before adding to preference models, debugging reward hacks, comparing rubric methodologies across domains. Then you'll build the systems that make those workflows 10x faster. When you have bandwidth, you'll contribute directly to research projects yourself. Your work will directly impact our ability to scale reward development across domains, from crafting and evaluating rubrics to understanding the effects of human feedback data to detecting and mitigating reward hacks. We're looking for someone who combines strong engineering fundamentals with research experience – someone who can scope ambiguous problems, ship quickly, and cares as much about the science as the systems. Note: For this role, we conduct all interviews in Python. Responsibilities Design and build infrastructure that enables researchers to rapidly iterate on reward signals, including tools for rubric development, human feedback data analysis, and reward robustness evaluation Develop systems for automated quality assessment of rewards, including detection of reward hacks and other pathologies Create tooling that allows researchers to easily compare different reward methodologies (preference models, rubrics, programmatic rewards) and understand their effects Build pipelines and workflows that reduce toil in reward development, from dataset preparation to evaluation to deployment Implement monitoring and observability systems to track reward signal quality and surface issues during training runs Collaborate with researchers to translate science requirements into platform capabilities Optimize existing systems for performance, reliability, and ease of use Contribute to the development of best practices and documentation for reward development workflows You may be a good fit if you Have prior research experience Are excited to work closely with researchers and translate ambiguous requirements into well-scoped engineering projects Have strong Python skills Have experience with ML workflows and data pipelines, and building related infrastructure/tooling/platforms Are comfortable working across the stack, ranging from data pipelines to experiment tracking to user-facing tooling Can balance building robust, maintainable systems with the need to move quickly in a research environment Are results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description Care about the societal impacts of your work and are motivated by Anthropi