Design Engineer, AI Capability Development (Education Labs)
Design Engineering for AI Capability Development at Anthropic's Education Labs hits the sweet spot of technical craft and meaningful impact. Building educational experiences around AI capabilities requires both deep technical understanding and human-centered design thinking—a rare combination that could shape how society learns about AI.
Job description
# Design Engineer, AI Capability Development (Education Labs)
Location: San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY
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 believe skill with AI is fundamental to human agency. Education Labs builds the paradigms that help people become genuinely more capable—not just more engaged.
This is a new kind of role: part researcher, part product builder, part interaction designer. You'll be the second technical builder on a small team studying how AI transforms human capability—and shipping features based on what we discover. You'll have significant creative license to define what "good" looks like, exploring new interaction patterns rather than optimizing existing ones.
We're skeptical of tutorials, onboarding flows, and engagement metrics. We care about experiences that make users progressively more capable, curious, and empowered over time. This means integrating skill development into product design, using Claude itself as a capability-building partner, and measuring success by how users actually grow.
You'll operate as a one-person technical shop: prototyping new ideas, establishing technical direction, and shipping production-quality features to millions of users. You'll need strong product instincts and clean interface design sensibilities, balanced with comfort in ambiguity and frontier thinking.
Responsibilities
You may be a good fit if you have
Strong full-stack engineering with design sensibility
Deep conviction about human capability
Research mindset with product execution
Strategic leadership and coalition building
Strong candidates may also have
What this role is not
This is a hands-on technical role building product features, embedded within a research team. You'll provide technical guidance and help set direction, but this role doesn't involve people management off the bat. If you're looking to immediately transition into engineering management or lead a large team, this likely isn't the right fit.
Compensation
Annual Salary: $300,000 - $405,000 USD
Logistics
Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.
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.
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.
About Anthropic
AI safety company building Claude, one of the most capable and thoughtful AI assistants. Founded by former OpenAI researchers focused on making AI that's helpful, harmless, and honest.
anthropic.com