Design Lead

We are looking for an experienced design leader to create and cultivate the design culture at Anthropic, a safety-focused organization at the forefront of AI research. As Design Lead you will set the overall design vision and strategy for how users interact with and experience our AI technologies and hire and manage a team to execute that vision. 

We believe that large, general AI systems will have a significant impact on society, fundamentally changing how people interact with computers. This will provide many benefits to society, but because the technology can be unpredictable, unreliable and opaque, it also presents many challenges. How these systems are deployed, how they touch people’s lives, and how people interact with them are complicated problems that will require very considered design solutions. We think of design as being a partner to our more technical safety efforts.

About Anthropic
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our customers and for society as a whole. Our interdisciplinary team has experience across ML, physics, policy, business and product.
Responsibilities:
  • Recruit and mentor a design team for Anthropic
  • Develop design processes and best practices
  • Proselytize design across the organization, from research to product teams
  • Design the user experience for interacting with an AI assistant
  • Conduct user research to understand how people perceive and engage with AI technologies
  • Design interfaces for reviewing, monitoring, and improving AI systems
  • Work with engineers and researchers to ensure a great user experience for AI applications
  • Work closely with entirely new AI systems and design new ways for how people can reliably use them
  • You may be a good fit if you:
  • Have 5+ years of experience as a design manager
  • Have excellent communication skills to collaborate with engineers and researchers
  • Have experience recruiting and mentoring design teams, and experience working directly with machine learning models and designing interfaces for them
  • Have experience designing for chat or multimodal interfaces
  • Have an interest in AI safety and ethics
  • Have experience at fast-growing startups
  • Want to fundamentally change and positively affect how people interact with computers
  • Annual Salary (USD)
  • The expected salary range for this position is $375k - $520k

  • Logistics
    Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in our office at least 25% of the time.

    Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

    US visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate; operations roles are especially difficult to support. But if we make you an offer, we will make every effort to get you into the United States, 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.

    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.

    Benefits - Benefits we offer include:
    - 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.
    - 21 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.

    * This compensation and benefits information is based on Anthropic’s good faith estimate for this position, in San Francisco, CA, as of the date of publication and may be modified in the future. 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're trying to build a core of knowledge and intuition about the most robustly effective innovations in AI, and so thoroughly-documented null results are almost as valuable as positive discoveries. 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.
    Apply for this job
    logo Anthropic Design Full-time 💰 375K - 520K Hybrid 📍 San Francisco, CA Apply Now
    Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again.
    Your subscription has been successful.

    Newsletter

    Subscribe and stay updated.

    Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again.
    Your subscription has been successful.

    Join our newsletter