Industry R&D
Research Associate, Biology
Anthropic
San Francisco, CA
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 team
Anthropic's Life Sciences team is building a world-class research group focused on making fundamental biological discoveries. The team combines cutting-edge AI with hands-on biological research, positioning Anthropic at the forefront of demonstrating how AI tools can accelerate scientific workflows and enable discovery.
About the role
We are hiring Research Associates: early-career bench scientists who will join a small team to help establish our biology research program. This is an entry-level role, great for individuals who have done some research during an undergrad or masters program and may be considering pursuing a PhD in Life Sciences in the future.
You'll work directly alongside senior scientists, executing and troubleshooting experiments at the bench while learning advanced techniques in a fast-moving, highly collaborative environment. We value curiosity, careful hands, and the willingness to take ownership of a result. Our scientists are eager to teach; we're hiring for motivation and trajectory as much as for existing skill.
This is a fully hands-on bench role — while familiarity with computational biology and bioinformatics is welcome, the role does not involve AI/ML model development.
Key responsibilities
- Execute molecular biology and biochemistry experiments at the bench under the direction of senior scientists
- Maintain meticulous, reproducible records and contribute to shared protocols
- Troubleshoot experiments, propose adjustments, and present results clearly in group meetings
- Maintain mammalian and bacterial cell lines, materials stocks, and reagent inventories
- Learn and adopt new techniques rapidly as projects evolve, with training provided
Minimum qualifications
- Have hands-on research experience in molecular biology, biochemistry, or a closely related field
- Are proficient with foundational molecular biology techniques: PCR, gel electrophoresis, molecular cloning, and plasmid preparation
- Have experience with aseptic technique and bacterial or mammalian cell culture, and with nucleic acid extraction, purification, and quantification
- Follow, document, and adapt experimental protocols with care and precision
- Are highly motivated, eager to learn, and energized by hands-on bench work
- Are practical and resourceful — you'd rather find a way through than a reason it can't be done
- Listen carefully, take feedback well, ask good questions, and are comfortable when priorities shift quickly
- Are excited to use AI models as a tool at the bench to plan experiments, interpret data, and decide what to try next
Preferred qualifications
- A BS or MS in molecular biology, biochemistry, chemical biology, microbiology, bioengineering, or a related discipline
- Protein expression and purification experience (e.g., affinity, SEC, IEX)
- Mammalian cell culture experience, including transfection and stable line maintenance
- Enzyme kinetics or quantitative biochemical assay development (fluorescence, absorbance, FRET)
- Next-generation sequencing library preparation experience
- Familiarity with common bioinformatics workflows and molecular biology software (e.g., sequence analysis, alignment, primer and construct design)
- Experience using AI tools such as Claude in a research setting — for literature review, protocol drafting, data interpretation, or experimental troubleshooting
This is a rare opportunity to help define how a frontier AI company does biology. You'll learn quickly, work closely with people who want to teach, and see your results feed directly into how the most capable AI models are evaluated and improved.
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.
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.