Is the Research Engineer, Virtual Collaborator (Cowork) role remote?

It's hybrid — Anthropic expects some on-site time in New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA.

What's the salary range?

Anthropic lists $500,000–$850,000 for this role.

How much experience is required?

5–8 years of relevant experience for this Research Engineer, Virtual Collaborator (Cowork) role.

Where is the role based?

Anthropic is hiring for this position in New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA.

What's the tech stack?

Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: Microsoft Office, Machine Learning, Slack, reinforcement learning, Python, Google Workspace.

Does Anthropic sponsor work visas for this role?

Yes — the posting indicates visa sponsorship is available for the right candidate.

What seniority level is this role?

Anthropic targets senior candidates for this position.

Research Engineer, Virtual Collaborator (Cowork) at Anthropic

Joblaze summary

In this role, the Research Engineer focuses on enhancing Claude's capabilities as a virtual collaborator by designing reinforcement learning environments tailored to real organizational tasks. Proficiency in Python and a strong background in machine learning are essential, particularly for those with experience in creating realistic training scenarios and evaluation frameworks. This position is well-suited for seasoned professionals who can navigate the intersection of research and product development while collaborating across teams. Anthropic emphasizes a cohesive team approach, valuing communication and collaboration in their mission to build beneficial AI systems.

Joblaze insights

Listed about a month ago on Joblaze — tracked directly from Anthropic's career page.
Anthropic has 401 other open roles including Finance & Strategy, EMEA GTM (Dublin or London location), Director, Infrastructure Compute Procurement, Engineering Manager, Cybersecurity Products.
2358 active Python roles on Joblaze right now.
624 active AI roles on Joblaze right now.
270 active Machine Learning roles on Joblaze right now.
Salary band is above the typical range for AI/ML (median ~$190,000).

Quick facts

Is the Research Engineer, Virtual Collaborator (Cowork) role remote?: It's hybrid — Anthropic expects some on-site time in New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA.
What's the salary range?: Anthropic lists $500,000–$850,000 for this role.
How much experience is required?: 5–8 years of relevant experience for this Research Engineer, Virtual Collaborator (Cowork) role.
Where is the role based?: Anthropic is hiring for this position in New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA.
What's the tech stack?: Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: Microsoft Office, Machine Learning, Slack, reinforcement learning, Python, Google Workspace.
Does Anthropic sponsor work visas for this role?: Yes — the posting indicates visa sponsorship is available for the right candidate.
What seniority level is this role?: Anthropic targets senior candidates for this position.
Is this full-time or contract?: Full-time for this Research Engineer, Virtual Collaborator (Cowork) role at Anthropic.

From the original posting

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

We are looking for a Research Engineer to help us train Claude specifically for virtual collaborator workflows. While Claude excels at general tasks, a lot of knowledge work requires targeted training on real organizational data and workflows. Your job will be to design and implement reinforcement learning (RL) environments that transform Claude into the best virtual collaborator, training on realistic tasks from navigating internal knowledge to creating financial models.

Responsibilities:

Training Claude on document manipulation with good taste, including understanding, enhancing, and co-creating (e.g., Office doc formats, data visualization)
Designing and implementing reinforcement learning pipelines targeted at virtual collaborator use cases (productivity, organizational navigation, vertical domains)
Building and scaling our data creation platform for generating high-quality, open-ended tasks with domain experts and crowdworkers Integrating real organizational data to create realistic training environments
Developing robust evaluation systems that maintain quality while avoiding reward hacking
Partnering directly with product teams (e.g., Cowork, claude.ai) to ensure training aligns with product features

You may be a good fit if you:

Are a very experienced Python programmer who can quickly produce reliable, high quality code that your teammates love using
Have 5-8 years of strong machine learning experience
Thrive at the intersection of research and product, with a pragmatic approach to solving real-world problems
Are comfortable with ambiguity and can balance research rigor with shipping deadlines
Enjoy collaborating across multiple teams (data operations, model training, product)
Can context-switch between research problems and product engineering tasks
Care about making AI genuinely helpful for everyday enterprise workflows

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

Creating RL envs for realistic tasks.
Reward modeling and preventing reward hacking
Building human-in-the-loop training systems or crowdsourcing platforms
Working with enterprise tools and APIs (Google Workspace, Microsoft Office, Slack, etc.)
Developing evaluation frameworks for open-ended tasks
Domain expertise in finance, legal, or healthcare workflows
Creating scalable data pipelines with quality control mechanisms
Translating product requirements into technical training objectives

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

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 @anthropic.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.

How we're different

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 work on smaller and 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 are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.