Staff+ Software Engineer (Distributed Systems)

Location: New York City, NY or San Francisco, CA; hybrid policy requires staff to be in an office at least 25% of the time

Annual salary: $320,000–$485,000 USD

Company

Anthropic builds reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems intended to be safe and beneficial for users and society.

What you will do

• Develop monitoring systems that detect unwanted model behavior and support automated enforcement and analyst review.
• Deploy monitoring systems across multiple clouds and provider environments using shared pipelines, smoke tests, observability, and alerting.
• Design and harden sandboxed runtimes for AI agents, including isolation, network egress controls, least-privilege access, audit logging, and insider-risk controls.
• Manage cost and capacity for large volumes of long-running agent workloads while meeting service-level objectives.
• Partner with engineers, researchers, security, privacy, and legal teams to ship trusted detection capabilities.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or comparable experience.
• Proficiency in Python, distributed systems, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience with multiple cloud providers or provider-agnostic infrastructure.
• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed infrastructure such as data platforms, control planes, or job schedulers.
• Experience with sandboxing and isolation technologies, including containers, microVMs, or network policy, or with a systems language such as Rust.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to have

• 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• Experience handling sensitive or regulated data with access control, auditability, retention, and data residency requirements.
• Experience running LLM-based agents in production.
• Experience with integrity, spam, fraud, or abuse detection and mitigation.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative work on large-scale AI research and safety efforts.
• Flexible working hours and office-based collaboration.
• Competitive compensation, equity donation matching, generous vacation, and parental leave.
• Visa sponsorship is available, with immigration lawyer support, subject to role and candidate eligibility.