Staff Software Engineer (Environments Infrastructure)

TL;DR

Staff Software Engineer (AI Infrastructure): Building and maintaining the infrastructure for reinforcement learning environments to improve Claude’s capabilities with an accent on API design, framework development, and distributed systems. Focus on productionizing research, designing robust agent runtimes, and ensuring system correctness and scalability.

Location: Hybrid (San Francisco, CA or New York City, NY). Must be in office at least 25% of the time.

Salary: $405,000 - $605,000 USD

Company

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation focused on creating reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

What you will do

• Design widely used APIs and frameworks that researchers use to build RL environments.
• Own platform layers and agent runtimes that support all environments.
• Build tooling for environment owners to debug and maintain systems in production.
• Collaborate with research teams to identify abstractions and improve research codebases.
• Prevent silent failures through type safety, invariants, and targeted testing.
• Mentor researchers and engineers on engineering standards and design patterns.

Requirements

• Deep expertise in Python, including static typing, async, concurrency, and performance.
• Proven track record in API and framework design adopted by other engineers.
• Experience designing stateful concurrent or distributed systems.
• Ability to work productively in large, evolving research-style codebases.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Must be based in or able to work from San Francisco or New York City (Hybrid).

Nice to have

• Experience with ML research, RL workflows, or LLM training pipelines.
• Experience building agent frameworks or orchestration engines.
• Familiarity with sandboxed or containerized remote execution platforms.
• Experience with large-scale data processing and data lineage systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative "big science" environment focusing on high-impact research.
• Competitive compensation with optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Flexible working hours and modern office spaces for collaboration.
• Visa sponsorship available for qualified candidates.