Staff Software Engineer - Claude Design

About the role

At Anthropic, we're building AI systems that are safe, beneficial, and transformative. Our mission is to develop AI that benefits humanity, and we believe the most powerful capabilities emerge when we thoughtfully bridge the gap between research breakthroughs and real-world applications.

Claude Design is the newest product from Anthropic Labs, the internal accelerator behind Claude Code and MCP. It lets anyone collaborate with Claude to create polished visual work: interactive prototypes, product mockups, slides, one-pagers, and marketing collateral. Start from a prompt, an image, or your own codebase, and Claude builds a first version that you refine through conversation, inline comments, direct edits, and live adjustment controls, then hand off to Claude Code to build for real. We launched in research preview in April 2026, and the product is new enough that the engineers who join now will define what it becomes.

We're looking for Software Engineers to help build and shape Claude Design. This is a craft-heavy, frontend-leaning role: you'll create the canvas, real-time editing, design-system inference, and AI-driven generation experiences that make AI-generated design feel like a tool people reach for first– not a demo. You'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world application, rapidly building and testing new experiences, partnering directly with researchers and users, and helping to generate the crucial insights that shape where the product goes next.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship Claude Design's core surfaces (the design canvas, real-time editing, inline comments, and the live adjustment controls Claude generates), shipping early and often to maximize learning

• Collaborate closely with research teams to turn frontier vision and generation capabilities into intuitive, high-craft design experiences

• Work directly with designers, internal test users, and external partners to gather feedback, iterate quickly, and validate (or invalidate) product concepts

• Set technical direction for the hardest frontend problems: editor and canvas architecture, real-time collaboration, design-system inference, rich import/export, and performance as the product scales

• Design and run experiments to test product hypotheses, from prototype tests with users to evaluations of generation quality, balancing creative exploration with rigorous measurement

• Own the quality bar for how the product looks and feels, treating latency, responsiveness, and reliability as first-class concerns rather than afterthoughts, and advocate for user experience and design considerations early in the process

• Strengthen the handoff to Claude Code so designs translate cleanly into production, and feed insights back to research about model effectiveness and where capabilities can improve

• Operate as a technical leader on a small team: shape the roadmap alongside design and product, make pragmatic architecture decisions, and mentor engineers as the team grows

You may be a good fit if you

• Have 8+ years of experience building full-stack applications with deep frontend strength, and a track record of zero-to-one work in startup or startup-like environments

• Have set technical direction for a team or workstream and mentored other engineers, while staying hands-on in the code

• Have strong design sensibility and a high bar for craft; you sweat interaction details, motion, and polish

• Have strong technical skills across modern web stacks (React, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Go, etc.), including complex client-side state, performance, APIs, databases, and cloud technologies

• Are comfortable working in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift and shipping quickly matters

• Are deeply user-centric: you enjoy validating ideas with actual users before over-investing and you talk about problems before solutions

• Hold strong opinions loosely: you advocate forcefully for ideas but change your mind based on evidence

• Are a generalist who can move comfortably between frontend, backend, and product problems as the work demands

• Work independently with good judgment about what matters, without needing constant direction

• Communicate effectively and translate complex AI capabilities into intuitive experiences

• Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work

Strong candidates may also have

• Extensive experience working with or building visual collaboration & creative tools (e.g., Figma, Canva, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc), and have strong opinions on how they could become more magical experiences

• Hands-on experience with UI/UX for AI-powered applications, and fluency collaborating closely with designers

• Background conducting user research, interviews, and usability testing

• Deep frontend expertise in canvas rendering, complex editor UIs, design-system tooling, or graphics work (WebGL/shaders, 3D, animation)

• Experience with real-time, collaborative applications (multiplayer editing, WebSockets) or complex, high-performance frontend interactions

Candidates need not have

• 100% of the skills listed above

• Formal certifications or education credentials

• Direct machine learning or AI research experience

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

Annual Salary: 320000 - 485000 USD