Applied AI Engineer, Startups (Life Sciences)
San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY · New York City, NY · San Francisco · USD 280,000-320,000 / year · 4+ years experience · Hybrid · Posted Oct 15, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 4+ years experience
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY · New York City, NY · San Francisco
- Salary
- USD 280,000-320,000 / year · Base salary
- Visa sponsorship
- Visa sponsorship available
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
- The Applied AI Engineer on the Startups team acts as a technical advisor to life sciences and biotech startups, helping them integrate Claude into their products and research workflows.
- This role bridges the gap between AI capabilities and scientific needs by partnering with engineering and scientific teams on architecture, agent design, and implementation.
- The position involves developing technical resources, evaluation frameworks, and reference implementations to enable startups to scale their AI-driven scientific discoveries.
Responsibilities
- Serve as a deep technical advisor to high-potential life sciences and biotech startups.
- Work hands-on with startup engineering and scientific teams through pair programming and architecture reviews.
- Develop prototypes, technical documentation, evaluation suites, and scientifically grounded benchmarks.
- Create reference implementations and sample code, such as MCP servers for genomics platforms and literature databases.
- Collaborate with Applied AI Architects to maintain context across customer engagements.
- Identify patterns in deploying AI in life sciences and provide feedback to internal Product, Engineering, and Research teams.
- Create technical content including documentation, tutorials, and sample code for startup audiences.
- Represent Anthropic in the life sciences startup ecosystem through hackathons, webinars, and technical office hours.
- Travel to customer sites for workshops, implementation guidance, and relationship building.
Requirements
- Deep experience in life sciences or biotech (e.g., genomics, drug discovery, molecular design, lab automation, or clinical development).
- 4+ years of technical experience as a software engineer, ML/research engineer, computational biologist, research scientist, or technical founder.
- Production experience building LLM-powered applications, including prompting, context engineering, agent architectures, evaluation frameworks, and deployment at scale.
- Experience with startups or high-growth companies.
- Strong technical communication skills with the ability to translate complex AI concepts for engineering and scientific audiences.
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience.
- Ability to travel to customer sites.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation
- Optional equity donation matching
- Generous vacation
- Parental leave
- Flexible working hours
Workplace
- Location-based hybrid policy: staff are expected to be in the office at least 25% of the time.
- Travel to customer sites is required for workshops and implementation guidance.
Skills
- Agent Architectures
- Evaluation Frameworks
- Genomics
- Drug Discovery
- Molecular Design
- Lab Automation
- Clinical Development
- MCP Servers
