Prompt Engineer & Librarian

Anthropic’s AI technology is amongst the most capable and safe in the world. However, large language models are a new type of intelligence, and the art of instructing them in a way that delivers the best results is still in its infancy — it’s a hybrid between programming, instructing, and teaching. You will figure out the best methods of prompting our AI to accomplish a wide range of tasks, then document these methods to build up a library of tools and a set of tutorials that allows others to learn prompt engineering, as well as work with high-value partners to directly solve their challenges.

Given that the field of prompt-engineering is arguably less than 2 years old, this position is a bit hard to hire for!  As a result, we ask that you share with us a specific prompt engineering project on LLMs that you’re proud of in your application!  Ideally, this project should show off a complex and clever prompting architecture or a systematic evaluation of an LLM’s behavior.

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our customers and for society as a whole. Our interdisciplinary team has experience across ML, physics, policy, business, and product.

Responsibilities:

• • Discover, test, and document best practices for a wide range of tasks relevant to our customers.
  • Build up a library of high-quality prompts or prompt chains to accomplish a variety of tasks, with an easy guide to help users search for the one that meets their needs.
  • Build a set of tutorials and interactive tools that teach the art of prompt engineering to our customers.
  • Work with large enterprise customers on their prompting strategies.

You may be a good fit if you:

• • Have 3-5 years of relevant or transferrable experience.
  • Have at least a high-level familiarity with the architecture and operation of large language models.
  • Are an excellent communicator, and love teaching technical concepts and creating high-quality documentation that helps out others.
  • Are excited to talk to motivated customers and help solve their problems.
  • Have a creative hacker spirit and love solving puzzles.
  • Have at least basic programming skills and would be comfortable writing small Python programs.
  • Have an organizational mindset and enjoy building teams from the ground up.
  • You think holistically and can proactively identify the needs of an organization.
  • Make ambiguous problems clear and identify core principles that can translate across scenarios.
  • Have a passion for making powerful technology safe and societally beneficial.
  • You anticipate unforeseen risks, model out scenarios, and provide actionable guidance to internal stakeholders.
  • Think creatively about the risks and benefits of new technologies, and think beyond past checklists and playbooks.
  • You stay up-to-date and informed by taking an active interest in emerging research and industry trends.

Annual Salary

• • The expected salary range for this position is $250k – $375k USD.

Hybrid policy & US visa sponsorship: Currently, we expect all staff to be in our office at least 25% of the time. We do sponsor visas! However, we aren’t able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate; operations roles are especially difficult to support. But if we make you an offer, we will make every effort to get you into the United States, 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.

Compensation and Benefits*

Anthropic’s compensation package consists of three elements: salary, equity, and benefits. We are committed to pay fairness and aim for these three elements collectively to be highly competitive with market rates.

Equity – On top of this position’s salary (listed above), equity will be a major component of the total compensation. We aim to offer higher-than-average equity compensation for a company of our size, and communicate equity amounts at the time of offer issuance.

Benefits – Benefits we offer include:

– Optional equity donation matching at a 3:1 ratio, up to 50% of your equity grant.

– Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and all your dependents.

– 401(k) plan with 4% matching.

– 21 weeks of paid parental leave.

– Unlimited PTO – most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more!

– Stipends for education, home office improvements, commuting, and wellness.

– Fertility benefits via Carrot.

– Daily lunches and snacks in our office.

– Relocation support for those moving to the Bay Area.

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than working on smaller, more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We’re an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we pursue the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.  We’re trying to build a core of knowledge and intuition about the most robustly effective innovations in AI, and so thoroughly-documented null results are almost as valuable as positive discoveries. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both as needed.