Staff Software Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Staff Software Engineer (AI): Owning the end-to-end development environment for the team building Claude with an accent on container lifecycle, dependency management, and inner-loop latency. Focus on designing isolated sandboxes, implementing pre-push validation, and scaling repository topology to support agentic coding workflows.

Location: Must be based in or able to commute to San Francisco, CA or New York City, NY (Hybrid: 25%+ in-office)

Salary: $405,000 - $485,000 USD

Company

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company dedicated to building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

What you will do

• Own the local and hosted development environment lifecycle, including container management and dependency provisioning.
• Drive down cold-start times and optimize edit-build-test latency for a complex multi-service stack.
• Design and implement environment isolation models such as ephemeral environments and sandboxes.
• Build pre-push validation frameworks to catch failures locally before they reach CI.
• Partner with infrastructure and tooling teams to evolve repository and platform topology.
• Act as a technical lead to gather requirements and build consensus across engineering teams.

Requirements

• Significant professional experience in backend or developer infrastructure domains.
• Proficiency in Python.
• Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and pod-level operations.
• Prior ownership of a developer environment or paved-path workflow in a multi-team organization.
• Daily, hands-on use of AI coding assistants in your own development workflow.
• Must be able to work from our San Francisco or New York offices at least 25% of the time.

Nice to have

• 7+ years of relevant engineering experience.
• Experience with Rust or Go.
• Familiarity with hermetic build systems like Bazel, Buck, or Nix.
• Track record of leading major repository migrations or monorepo extractions.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive compensation with equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave policies.
• Flexible working hours.
• Collaborative research-driven environment focused on AI safety.
• Visa sponsorship available for qualified candidates.