Staff+ Software Engineer (AI)

Location: San Francisco, CA or New York City, NY; hybrid policy requires staff to work from an office at least 25% of the time, with some roles requiring more office time

Annual salary: $405,000–$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

• Build and ship user-facing features for Claude Design and other creative products.
• Set technical direction for editor and canvas architecture, real-time collaboration, and rich import/export.
• Own visual quality, interaction polish, latency, responsiveness, reliability, and user experience.
• Partner with researchers to prototype vision and generation experiences and improve Claude’s generated output.
• Talk with users, validate product ideas, and use findings to guide future development.
• Build shared foundations that enable new creative tools to launch quickly and work together.

Requirements

• Strong design sensibility and a high bar for craft, including interaction details, motion, and polish.
• Strong full-stack engineering skills with production frontend and backend experience on user-facing web products.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguity, exercise good judgment, take ownership, and maintain a bias toward shipping.
• User-centric approach: validate ideas with users before over-investing and investigate problems before solutions.
• Ability to advocate for ideas while changing direction based on evidence.
• Care for Anthropic’s mission and the societal impacts of the work.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent education, training, and/or experience in a field relevant to the role.

Nice to have

• Extensive experience building visual collaboration and creative tools.
• Experience with UI and UX for AI-powered applications and close collaboration with designers.
• Frontend expertise in canvas rendering, complex editor UIs, design-system tooling, or graphics such as WebGL, shaders, 3D, or animation.
• Experience building real-time collaborative applications, including multiplayer editing and WebSockets.
• Experience conducting user research, interviews, and usability testing.
• Experience shipping products from 0 to 1 and building product platforms, primitives, or shared foundations.
• Experience optimizing performance through profiling, rendering improvements, and end-to-end latency tracing.

Culture & Benefits

• Small, fast-moving team with high autonomy and close collaboration among engineering, design, research, and users.
• Competitive compensation, benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation, and parental leave.
• Flexible working hours and an office environment for collaboration.
• Visa sponsorship may be available; Anthropic makes reasonable efforts to support visas and works with an immigration lawyer.
• Anthropic values inclusive representation, communication, research discussion, and work on steerable, trustworthy AI.