Research Scientist, Life Sciences (Chemistry)

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

Anthropic's Life Sciences team is building a research group focused on biological discoveries by combining AI with hands-on biological research. We're seeking research scientists with deep medicinal chemistry expertise to join the team. Our goal is to speed up progress in the life sciences by an order of magnitude, and this role puts that mission into practice. You'll be an expert medicinal chemist with hands-on experience designing, synthesizing, purifying, and characterizing small molecules. Above all, you'll close the loop between AI-generated hypotheses and experimental data to share with the community. Working alongside AI researchers and engineers, you'll drive experimental programs end to end and pressure-test AI-designed molecules and AI-proposed synthetic routes against real chemistry.

This role is fully on-site in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Key responsibilities

• Design multi-step synthetic routes for small molecules and oversee their execution end to end, including route selection, reaction optimization, purification strategy, and interpretation of full characterization data (NMR, LC-MS, HPLC)
• Coordinate synthesis and biological evaluation with external contract research organizations and academic partners
• Evaluate AI-designed molecules and AI-proposed synthetic routes, drive them to experimental readout, and feed results back to research teams
• Apply medicinal chemistry principles, including SAR analysis and physicochemical property optimization, to compound design and prioritization
• Ensure experimental data across programs is high quality and well documented, including procedures, spectra, and failure modes
• Communicate findings clearly to chemistry, AI research, and life sciences audiences

Minimum qualifications

• PhD in chemistry
• Demonstrated medicinal chemistry experience, including SAR-driven design and optimization of small molecules, with recent, sustained hands-on synthetic work
• Comfort navigating ambiguity and defining problems in a rapidly evolving research environment
• Ability to work independently while collaborating effectively across cross-functional teams, with strong written and verbal communication skills

Preferred qualifications

• 5+ years of medicinal chemistry experience beyond the PhD
• Track record of advancing programs from hit identification through lead optimization
• Experience directing synthetic chemistry activities at contract research organizations
• Computational chemistry, cheminformatics, or coding skills, for example Python with RDKit or pandas for data analysis and automation
• Experience using AI or ML tools in the life sciences
• Publications and/or patents demonstrating scientific impact

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.