Staff+ Software Engineer, Platform Safety (AI)

Location: San Francisco, CA or New York City, NY; hybrid policy requires all staff to work from one of the offices at least 25% of the time. Preference is given to candidates based in NY, SEA, SF, or the Bay Area.

Annual salary: $405,000–$485,000 USD.

Company

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

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate systems that determine who can access Anthropic's most capable models and which capabilities they can use.
• Build a configurable platform for launching and operating trusted access programs, moving access rules from code into data.
• Develop reusable identity and business verification services, including KYC/KYB integrations, sensitive personal data protection, regional expansion, and fair review and appeal paths.
• Evolve access-granting and access-holding services, customer and user identity models, and highly available services across Anthropic products and cloud platforms.
• Shape architecture through written proposals, review designs, mentor engineers, participate in on-call and incident response, and support emerging programs.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer, ideally at tech lead level or equivalent.
• Ability to work across the stack when required and strong product sense when shaping new domains with cross-functional partners, including non-engineers.
• Regular use of AI tools when designing, building, and reviewing software.
• Experience designing and operating production distributed systems on a critical path where correctness, latency, and availability matter.
• Ownership of work across design, build, deployment, operations, and iteration.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, make independent technical decisions, set technical direction adopted by other engineers and teams, and work in both 0 → 1 and mature environments.
• Commitment to robust, scalable systems and to the societal impact of safe, beneficial AI.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience; relevant field of study demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with identity, access control, or authorization systems at scale.
• Experience with fraud, risk, trust and safety, or KYC/KYB systems, including verification vendor integrations.
• Experience in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments involving sensitive personal data.
• Experience integrating with AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or other partner ecosystems.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative environment combining research, engineering, policy, and business expertise around large-scale AI safety efforts.
• Flexible working hours and an office environment for collaboration.
• Competitive compensation, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation, and parental leave.
• Anthropic supports visa sponsorship where feasible and provides access to an immigration lawyer.
• Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis with no stated deadline.