Research Manager, Biological Safety

The role

You will lead a research engineering team responsible for biological safety. This includes designing capability evaluations, curating training data, and training safety classifiers for frontier models.

What you will do

• Manage, coach, and grow a team of research scientists and engineers
• Set the technical direction and roadmap for the biological safety research agenda
• Own the quality of capability evaluations for biological domain models
• Guide the development of training and evaluation datasets for safety classifiers
• Oversee the training and iteration of safety classifiers alongside ML engineers
• Ensure the team invests in tooling and pipelines for evaluation and classifier development
• Establish how the team measures classifier and eval performance against production traffic
• Direct red-teaming and stress-testing of safeguards
• Partner with Research, Product, Policy, and government affairs colleagues
• Represent the team's work in external communications

Required qualifications

• Experience managing a technical team, including hiring, coaching, and performance management
• A record of setting technical direction for a team and making prioritization calls under uncertainty
• Proficiency in Python, with a background in scientific programming and data analysis
• A solid grasp of ML fundamentals
• Knowledge of modern biology across both measurement and engineering
• Experience designing quantitative experiments or evaluations
• Clear analytical and writing skills
• Familiarity with dual-use research concerns and biosecurity frameworks
• Comfort with ambiguity and with shifting priorities
• Motivation to prevent misuse without obstructing beneficial work
• Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Nice to have

• 3+ years of people management experience, ideally leading research scientists, research engineers, or ML engineers
• Experience building a team or function from a small headcount
• At least 8 years of hands-on experience in life sciences
• Experience working with large language models, including prompting, fine-tuning, or evaluation
• Experience training or deploying classifiers or other ML systems in production
• Experience developing ML methods for biological systems or biological data
• Familiarity with adversarial robustness, red-teaming, or safety evaluation of ML systems
• Experience leading complex technical projects across multiple stakeholder groups

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits
• Optional equity donation matching
• Generous vacation and parental leave
• Flexible working hours
• Office space

Before you apply

• We do sponsor visas

About the company

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. Its mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.