Applied AI Engineer, Startups (Physical AI)

San Francisco · USD 280,000-320,000 / year · 4+ years experience · Hybrid · Posted Oct 15, 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.

The Applied AI Engineer on the Startups team acts as a technical advisor to AI-native startups building in physical sectors like robotics, aerospace, and manufacturing.
This role bridges the gap between Claude's capabilities and real-world engineering workflows by partnering with startup teams to integrate AI into their product design, simulation, and operations.
The engineer will develop custom evaluation frameworks, reference implementations, and technical resources to help startups scale their use of Claude.

Serve as a deep technical advisor to high-potential startups building in the physical world.
Work hands-on with startup software and hardware teams through pair programming and architecture reviews.
Develop prototypes, technical documentation, evaluation suites, and benchmarks grounded in real engineering tasks.
Create reference implementations and sample code for integrating Claude with CAD, simulation, design tools, or industrial automation.
Collaborate with Applied AI Architects to maintain context and continuity across customer engagements.
Identify patterns across engagements to build repeatable evaluations and contribute insights back to internal Product, Engineering, and Research teams.
Create technical content including documentation, tutorials, and sample code for startup audiences.
Foster community engagement through hackathons, webinars, technical office hours, and startup-focused events.
Travel to customer sites for workshops, implementation guidance, and relationship building.

Deep engineering experience in a physical discipline such as mechanical, electrical, aerospace, robotics, semiconductor, manufacturing, or civil engineering.
4+ years of technical experience as a software engineer, ML or research engineer, robotics or controls engineer, hardware or systems engineer, or technical founder.
Production experience building LLM-powered applications or a track record of successfully applying AI to real engineering work.
Experience with startups or high-growth companies.
Strong technical communication skills with the ability to translate complex AI concepts into architectural decisions.
Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.
Ability to travel to customer sites.

Location-based hybrid policy: expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time.