Applied AI Engineer, Public Sector

Washington, DC · Washington, D.C. · USD 280,000-320,000 / year · 4+ years experience · Hybrid · Posted Oct 7, 2026

At a glance

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.

As a member of the Applied AI team at Anthropic, you will be an Applied AI Engineer supporting a dedicated national security mission program.
You will be the customer's trusted technical advisor, working closely with their engineering and mission teams as they build and ship new capabilities powered by Claude.
You'll combine deep engineering expertise and cyber domain knowledge with customer-facing skills to help the customer unlock the full potential of Claude.

Serve as a specialist technical advisor for one or more national security mission programs, from discovery and evaluation through deployment and adoption, coordinating internally across multiple teams to drive customer success
Support the customer as they build with Claude Code, the Claude API, and Claude for Enterprise
Partner with account executives and Applied AI Architects to translate mission requirements into technical solutions
Influence technical architecture decisions and integration into the customer's existing stack by developing customized pilots, prototypes, and evaluation suites
Help develop evaluation frameworks to measure Claude's performance for mission-specific use cases
Lead hands-on technical workshops and code reviews with customer engineering teams
Identify common design patterns and contribute insights back to our Product and Engineering teams
Create and deliver technical content, from engineering deep dives to executive briefings
Maintain strong knowledge of the latest developments in LLM capabilities, implementation patterns, and AI product development stacks
Work primarily on-site with the customer's engineering and mission teams in secure government facilities, while maintaining close internal coordination and feedback with Anthropic's Applied AI and Engineering teams

Active TS/SCI clearance with Polygraph
Prior experience working within US intelligence community agencies as a government civilian or cleared contractor
4+ years of experience in technical roles such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Product Engineer, Software Engineer, or Technical Product Manager, with a desire to work closely with customers
Strong programming skills with proficiency in Python or TypeScript and experience building production applications
Hands-on expertise in one or more specified operational or technical domains
Exceptional communication skills to convey technical concepts to diverse stakeholders, from engineers to executives, while maintaining a low ego and collaborative approach
Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Production experience with LLMs, including advanced prompt engineering, agent development and frameworks, evaluation frameworks, transcript analysis, MCP, and deployment at scale
Experience deploying and operating software in air-gapped or classified environments
Experience designing scalable cloud architectures and integrating with enterprise systems
Background in artificial intelligence, machine learning, or data science
Ability to navigate ambiguity and execute across domains with intellectual openness, finding simple solutions to complex problems
High cooperation mindset for cross-organizational collaboration, balancing competing priorities with integrity
Passion for advancing safe, beneficial AI systems through creative technical applications

Work primarily on-site with the customer's engineering and mission teams in secure government facilities
Location-based hybrid policy expecting staff to be in an office at least 25% of the time