Research Engineer / Performance Engineer, RL Distributed Systems

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

Reinforcement learning is how Claude learns to reason, write code, and act autonomously over long horizons. At frontier scale, an RL run is an unusually demanding distributed system. Training, sampling, and environment execution run concurrently across a large fleet of accelerators and hosts, exchange data continuously, and have to keep making progress while hardware fails, load shifts, and the research changes underneath them.

How well that system holds together determines how much of our compute turns into learning, and how quickly the team can try the next idea. As a Research Engineer on the Distributed Systems team within RL Engineering, you'll work on whatever part of that system is the current limit. That might be scheduling and placement, data movement between components, running large numbers of sandboxed environments, storage and checkpointing, networking, fault tolerance, autoscaling, or the observability that tells us what a run is actually doing.

We're looking for generalists: engineers who can move between these layers, reason from first principles about a system they haven't seen before, and pick the problem that matters most rather than the one closest to their prior experience. Our system changes as fast as the research does, correctness under failure matters as much as throughput, and the best solutions often come from understanding the ML workload well enough to know which guarantees it actually needs.