Data Visualization Specialist, Interpretability
San Francisco, CA
Research /
Full-time /
Hybrid
You want to build bespoke data visualization tools for answering hard scientific questions. As a data visualization expert at Anthropic, you’d be a core member of a team reverse-engineering how neural networks work. Your work will help to open these "black boxes".
Many young scientific fields are fundamentally linked to the evolution of tools. The history of chemistry is intertwined with custom scientific glassware. Microbiology evolved with the microscope. Astronomy has been marked by progressively more powerful telescopes. We believe that data visualization is the key scientific tool for unlocking what goes inside neural networks, and we’re looking for a data visualization expert to be the scientific glassmaker of our metaphorical chemistry lab. We see this role as an essential part of our research process, equal to engineering and machine learning expertise, and we expect the visualization expert to be deeply integrated into the entire research process.
Our team’s current research is published at Transformer Circuits and it builds on ideas from the Circuits thread, Multimodal Neurons, Activation Atlases, and Building Blocks.
You’d be a good fit if you
- Have significant data visualization experience
- Love prototyping bespoke visualizations
- Want to use your data visualization skills to answer hard scientific questions
- Enjoy using tools like Svelte and D3 to build visualizations on top of web standards
- Feel comfortable with basic linear algebra and calculus (most of our visualizations involve this)
- Feel comfortable with Python (we build visualizations on web technologies, but our neural networks run in Python)
- Are excited to learn about machine learning research
- Care about the societal impacts of your work
- Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
Strong candidates may also have experience with some of the following
- Neural networks (especially Transformer language models)
- Circuit-based interpretabilityDimensionality reduction (PCA, NMF, t-SNE, umap)
- Visualizing large datasets (eg. using WebGL)
- Distributed systems (the neural networks we’re studying run on large distributed systems)
- Experience using data visualization in science.
Annual Salary (USD)
- The expected salary for this position is $280k - $450k.
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.
Compensation and Benefits*
Anthropic’s compensation package consists of three elements: salary, equity, and benefits. We are committed to pay fairness and aim for these three elements collectively to be highly competitive with market rates.
Equity - On top of this position's salary (listed above), equity will be a major component of the total compensation. We aim to offer higher-than-average equity compensation for a company of our size, and communicate equity amounts at the time of offer issuance.
US Benefits - The following benefits are for our US-based employees:
- Optional equity donation matching at a 3:1 ratio, up to 50% of your equity grant.
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and all your dependents.
- 401(k) plan with 4% matching.
- 22 weeks of paid parental leave.
- Unlimited PTO – most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more!
- Stipends for education, home office improvements, commuting, and wellness.
- Fertility benefits via Carrot.
- Daily lunches and snacks in our office.
- Relocation support for those moving to the Bay Area.
UK Benefits - The following benefits are for our UK-based employees:
- Optional equity donation matching at a 3:1 ratio, up to 50% of your equity grant.
- Private health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents.
- Pension contribution (matching 4% of your salary).
- 22 weeks of paid parental leave.
- Unlimited PTO – most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more!
- Health cash plan.
- Life insurance and income protection.
- Daily lunches and snacks in our office.
* This compensation and benefits information is based on Anthropic’s good faith estimate for this position as of the date of publication and may be modified in the future. Employees based outside of the UK or US will receive a different benefits package. The level of pay within the range will depend on a variety of job-related factors, including where you place on our internal performance ladders, which is based on factors including past work experience, relevant education, and performance on our interviews or in a work trial.
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. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both as needed.
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 based 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.
