Staff+ Software Engineer, Platform
Anthropic · San Francisco, United States +2 · 5mo ago
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:
We are looking for experienced software engineers to join our Platform organization. We build the foundational primitives that accelerate product development across Anthropic, and own infrastructure and systems that teams depend on to ship reliably and at scale - either internally or by hundreds of thousands of external global users and companies at all stages.
You'll independently scope complex, multi-month projects, drive cross-org alignment through ambiguous problem spaces, and make architectural decisions that shape how Anthropic builds and scales its products. You'll partner directly with research to productize cutting-edge capabilities, and will have lasting impact on the platform that hundreds of thousands of companies and internal/external engineers depend on every day.
We have multiple teams that are currently hiring. Team placement occurs after the interview process, taking into account your interests and experience alongside organizational needs. This flexible approach allows us to match talented engineers with the backend product efforts where they'll have the greatest impact and growth potential.
What you'll do:
Service Infra: we build and maintain the core infrastructure that powers Anthropic's engineering organization, from service mesh and observability systems to deployment pipelines and shared libraries. Our work enables product teams to build and operate reliable services at scale, making us a critical force multiplier across the entire company.
Platform Portability: We build and maintain the infrastructure that enables Anthropic to operate across multiple cloud providers. We focus on cloud-agnostic tooling, cross-cloud networking, and multi-region deployments.
Platform Intelligence: You'll build and scale the foundation of the Claude API—the systems that deliver Claude's intelligence to every developer, from startups to enterprise. You'll own the performance, reliability, and efficiency of our core serving path, ensuring users get the most speed and value from our models. You'll partner closely with inference and safeguards to optimize the full stack.
Billing Platform: Anthropic exists to ensure the world safely navigates the transition through transformative AI. That work is funded by commercial revenue — and every dollar of it runs through Billing Platform. We build and operate the infrastructure that turns product usage into revenue across everything Anthropic ships: Claude.ai, the Developer Platform, Claude Code, and whatever comes next. The faster we can price it and account for it correctly, the faster Anthropic can fund the mission. Depending on where you land, you might be building the integration contracts product teams plug into so they can launch a paid SKU without becoming billing experts, automating the quote-to-cash lifecycle so enterprise deals don’t bottleneck on manual ops, or building the reconciliation and data foundations that keep every revenue number trustworthy at audit time. This is production-critical infrastructure where correctness is non-negotiable — a rounding error here is a revenue discrepancy somewhere else — and you’ll work closely with Finance, Product, Sales, and Accounting to build systems that scale with the business.
Platform Serving: You'll focus on transforming Claude into a true knowledge worker by ensuring the model has access to and understanding of the right knowledge at the right time. You'll work on making it possible for developers to securely give Claude access to their data while automatically processing and retrieving relevant information. You'll partner directly with research to bring state-of-the-art retrieval advancements to developers.
Agentic Systems: You'll build the infrastructure and APIs that let developers create powerful agentic applications on the Claude API — including Claude Managed Agents, our managed platform for deploying and running agents in production. Your work spans the primitives agent developers depend on: tool use, multi-step reasoning, durable sessions and environments, and long-running task execution that lets Claude take actions and accomplish complex goals on a user's behalf. You'll make this platform ready for the largest enterprises to adopt, and partner with research to bring cutting-edge agent capabilities into production.
Auth & Identity: We build and maintain the critical infrastructure and control interfaces that power identity and authentication across Anthropic's product suite. We work closely with product teams, security, support, and trust & safety as customers. We create scalable solutions for user authentication, authorization, role-based access control, and single sign-on that form the backbone of our company's identity management operations. We maintain a user-centric approach, building reliable systems that our users and company can depend on as we tackle complex challenges at the intersection of security, scalability, and user experience.
Platform Safety: We're building the identity and verification product layer that enables safe model launches as Claude's capabilities expand. This critical effort partners with Safeguards, Auth & Identity, Policy, and Product teams across API, Claude.ai, and third-party platforms as customers, creating the systems for KYC/KYB, trust grant issuance and inheritance, and end-user verification that flow across every Anthropic surface. We sit at the intersection of trust, compliance, and product velocity, delivering the verification primitives that let Anthropic ship advanced model capabilities to the right users at massive scale.
You might be a good fit if you:
- Have a minimum of 8 years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer building scalable distributed systems, ideally operating at tech lead level or equivalent
- distributed systems, cloud-native products, developer tools, or external developer facing products
- Have strong fundamentals in service-oriented architectures, networking, and systems design, ideally having owned both the technical vision and execution of a foundational platform system end to end
- Are proficient in Python, Go, Rust, or similar systems languages
- Have experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and/or multi-cloud networking
- Take full ownership of your work—from design through deployment and operations
- Can navigate ambiguity and make sound technical decisions independently, and have ideally operated in 0 to 1 and more mature team or company settings
- Take a product-focused approach to platform work and care about building solutions that are robust, scalable, and easy to use
- Care about building systems that other engineers love to use
Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
Location Preference: Preference will be given to candidates based in NY, SEA, SF or the Bay Area given the current location of team.
The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.
For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.
Logistics
Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.
Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, 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.
Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.
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.
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 headquartered 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. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.