Staff+ Research Engineer, RL Data Platform

Anthropic$500K+*
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Strong full-stack engineering skills, with production experience in TypeScript/React (frontend) and Python (backend).
  • Experience designing and operating backend services and data pipelines.
  • Proven track record of owning projects from concept through to production.
  • Comfortable with changing technical stakeholder needs and able to push back effectively.
  • Effective use of AI tools in daily work.
  • Concern for the societal impacts of technological work.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and operate feedback and data collection interfaces for human annotators and researchers.
  • Develop and maintain backend services, APIs, and data pipelines for interactions between models and human feedback.
  • Own the reliability, latency, and usability of continuous systems interfacing with live model endpoints.
  • Collaborate with RL researchers to define and scope data collection campaigns and the necessary tooling.
  • Build dashboards and monitoring tools to provide visibility into data quality and collection throughput.
  • Identify and resolve bottlenecks in the data collection process to ensure timely integration into training.

Benefits

  • Flexible work schedule with hybrid office expectations (at least 25% time in-office).
  • Visa sponsorship available, with resources for immigration support.
  • Encouragement to apply regardless of meeting every single qualification, promoting inclusivity.
  • Commitment to representation and diverse perspectives in AI development.
Full Job Description
About the role

Anthropic's RL Data Platform team builds the systems that produce, move, and serve the human data Claude learns from: the interfaces humans use to give feedback, the pipelines that turn raw feedback into training signal, and the tooling researchers use to launch, monitor, and inspect data collection. Every RL run depends on a steady supply of high-quality data - human feedback, expert demonstrations, graded transcripts - and when a researcher has an idea for new data on Monday, our job is to make it collectable by Wednesday and in the training mix by Friday.

This is a full-stack, ownership-heavy role on a small, senior team. You'll design and ship web interfaces used by thousands of expert annotators, build the backend services and data pipelines behind them, and work directly with RL researchers to understand what data they need and why. You'll scope your own projects, make architectural calls, and see them through to production. We're looking for engineers who treat researchers as their users, build for reliability first, and care as much about the shape of the data leaving the system as the UI going into it.
Key responsibilities
  • Design, build, and operate the feedback and data collection interfaces used by human annotators, domain experts, and internal researchers.
  • Build and maintain the backend services, APIs, and pipelines that route model samples to humans and return structured feedback to training.
  • Own the reliability, latency, and usability of systems that run continuously against live model endpoints.
  • Partner with RL researchers to translate loosely specified data needs into well-scoped collection campaigns and the tooling to run them.
  • Build dashboards, monitoring, and inspection tools so researchers can see data quality and throughput without asking an engineer.
  • Identify and remove the bottlenecks between "we want this data" and "it's in the training mix".
Minimum qualifications
  • Strong full-stack engineering skills, with production experience in TypeScript/React on the frontend and Python on the backend.
  • Experience designing and operating backend services and data pipelines that other teams depend on.
  • A track record of owning projects end-to-end, from an ambiguous brief to something in production that people use.
  • Comfort working directly with technical stakeholders whose needs change week to week, and the judgment to push back when something isn't worth building.
  • Effective use of AI tools in your own day-to-day work.
  • Care about the societal impacts of your work.
Preferred qualifications
  • Experience building annotation, labelling, evaluation, or other human-in-the-loop data tooling.
  • Experience with RLHF, preference data, or other human-feedback pipelines for ML systems.
  • Experience shipping researcher-facing or other expert-facing internal tools people love: interviewing users, hunting down friction, measurably improving the experience.
  • Experience running experiments on data collection interfaces and using the results to improve data quality.
  • Experience working with crowdworker or expert vendor platforms at scale.
  • Familiarity with how LLMs are trained and evaluated.
Representative projects
  • Build an interface that lets a domain expert review a long agentic transcript, flag the step where things went wrong, and write a corrected continuation - with the result landing in a training-ready format.
  • Rework the sampling path between our feedback interfaces and model endpoints to cut time-to-first-sample for annotators.
  • Build a campaign launcher that lets a researcher stand up a new data collection effort (task, rubric, population, quality checks) without writing code.
  • Instrument annotator behaviour to detect low-effort or adversarial work and surface it to the quality team automatically.
  • Design the data model for a kind of feedback we haven't collected before, and ship the pipeline that gets it into the training mix.


The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role's On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$500,000-$850,000 USD

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from [redacted].com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links-visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

About Anthropic

Anthropic is an artificial intelligence research lab that focuses on developing AI systems that are safe, reliable, and trustworthy. The company was founded in 2019 by Dr. Yoshua Bengio, a leading AI researcher and winner of the Turing Award. Anthropic's research is focused on developing AI systems that can learn from small amounts of data, reason about complex systems, and interact with humans in a natural way. The company is based in New York City and has a team of experienced AI researchers and engineers.
Learn more about Anthropic
Size
50 employees
Industry
Founded
2019

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at Anthropic

More Consumer Technology Jobs

Find similar Staff+ Research Engineer, RL Data Platform jobs: