[Expression of Interest] Team Founder, Speculative Prototyping
About Anthropic
Anthropic’s mission is to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems that are genuinely beneficial to society. We are researchers, engineers, policy practitioners, and operators working together to make frontier AI safer and more useful in practice.
About the Team
This is an expression of interest for a founding leadership role. We are exploring the formation of a small, high-leverage Speculative Prototyping team focused on turning uncertain frontier questions into concrete artifacts that improve decisions.
This role is designed for a range-oriented builder: someone who can move across engineering, design, research, public explanation, and organizational practice without losing rigor. You will define the function from zero: charter, methods, staffing model, interfaces with research/policy/product, and the artifact standards that make outputs credible across audiences.
The team’s work should reduce ambiguity around deployment, safety posture, governance pathways, and strategic direction by making plausible futures inspectable before they become irreversible. The expectation is not abstract vision alone, but carrying material freight from framing through implementation, evaluation, and uptake.
What You'll Do
- Define and launch Anthropic’s Speculative Prototyping function, including charter, operating model, intake, prioritization, and review rituals.
- Build and lead a small interdisciplinary team spanning technical prototyping, evaluation design, narrative synthesis, pedagogy, and policy translation.
- Create artifact pipelines that convert weak signals and strategic questions into concrete prototypes, simulations, model organisms, and decision briefs.
- Partner with Research, Product, Policy, Security, Communications, and executive leadership so speculative artifacts map to real decisions, mitigations, and launch criteria.
- Set quality bars for plausibility, rigor, and usefulness, including reproducibility standards and explicit assumptions tracking.
- Establish a portfolio approach balancing near-term operational needs with longer-horizon institutional foresight.
Sample Projects
- Design a prototype package for a frontier capability threshold shift, including a user-facing artifact, internal evaluation protocol, and governance implications memo.
- Run a rapid speculative sprint on a new autonomy surface area and deliver concrete policy, product, and safety options with tradeoff analysis.
- Build a recurring “futures-to-tests” system that turns narrative scenarios into benchmarkable evaluations and red-team drills.
- Develop executive-ready artifact walkthroughs that clarify second-order effects, failure paths, and intervention points.
- Create a public-facing simulation artifact that helps non-specialists reason about a consequential AI decision surface.
- Support leadership on high-stakes strategic questions with artifact design, evidence synthesis, and scenario comparison under uncertainty.
- Design and facilitate workshops that help internal teams build durable speculative prototyping capability, not one-off inspiration.
You May Be a Good Fit If You
- Have led 0->1 programs or initiatives under uncertainty and can turn ambiguity into coherent execution.
- Can recruit, mentor, and retain high-agency interdisciplinary talent.
- Deep experience with speculative design, design fiction, foresight, or adjacent methods for making uncertainty tangible and actionable.
- Comfort with public speaking and executive communication, including translating technical concepts for non-technical audiences and synthesizing complex information into clear narratives.
- Diverse experience across research, product, policy, creative practice, or adjacent domains that gives you a broad perspective on sociotechnical systems.
- Entrepreneurial or founder/operator experience, or equivalent evidence that you can carry material freight from concept through implementation and delivery.
- A non-linear educational or career path that demonstrates repeated adaptation, disciplined learning, and applied judgment across domains.
- Have excellent written and verbal communication; you can present technical uncertainty and strategic implications with precision.
- Bring a track record of artifact-led influence: your outputs change priorities, not just conversations.
- Have demonstrated judgment in high-stakes contexts involving safety, policy, security, or public-interest impact.
Strong Candidates May Also Have
- Founder/operator experience or equivalent ownership across strategy, execution, and team formation.
- Experience bridging research and governance contexts (policy, standards, civil society, regulatory, or safety institutes).
- Backgrounds in history of technology, STS, design research, media practice, or adjacent fields that sharpen sociotechnical reasoning.
- A serious creative/making practice (writing, photography, filmmaking, fabrication, archival work) that strengthens technical inquiry.
- Experience building evaluation systems for autonomous or agentic model behavior.
Annual Salary:
The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.
$420,000 - $980,000 USD
Logistics
- Education requirements: Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience is a nice-to-have but not required. We value diverse experiential, educational, and professional backgrounds and encourage candidates from all paths to apply. Capabilities and demonstrated judgment matter as much or more than credentials.
- Location-based hybrid policy: We currently expect staff to be in an Anthropic office at least 25% of the time; some projects may require more in-person collaboration.
- Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas when feasible for the role and candidate, and we make reasonable efforts to support immigration pathways when extending an offer.
- Relocation: We are open to relocation for this role and assess case-by-case support.
- Interview format: For this role, we conduct all interviews in Python. Interviews run in a private, time-boxed Docker environment with hypothetical tasks aligned to expected role scope.
How we're different
You should apply if you build with equal comfort across code, institutions, and culture: defining methods, shipping artifacts, and helping leadership reason under uncertainty with concrete evidence.
In this role, “speculative” means disciplined and testable. The point is not prediction theater. The point is building prototypes that make difficult choices clearer, earlier, and more responsibly.
Come work with us!
This is an expression-of-interest posting. We may engage candidates on varying timelines as team scope and headcount planning finalize.
Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a collaborative office environment.
Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.
Candidates may work with an individual assistant or an agent orchestra (a small set of agents they regularly orchestrate). We evaluate judgment in goal-setting, policy constraints, and verification quality, not just generation speed.
Interview tasks are synthetic and hypothetical. They are designed to reflect anticipated work types for this team and are not based on active production projects.
We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet every listed qualification. Strong candidates come from many routes, and we value a broad range of lived, professional, and disciplinary perspectives.
Your safety matters to us. Anthropic recruiters only contact candidates from @anthropic.com addresses or clearly identified partner agencies. We will never request fees or banking information prior to employment.
As set forth in Anthropic’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under applicable law.
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