Staff Software Engineer

About Anthropic

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

Anthropic's Infrastructure organization is foundational to our mission of developing AI systems that are reliable, interpretable, and steerable. The systems we build determine how quickly we can train new models, how reliably we can run safety experiments, and how effectively we can scale Claude to millions of users — demonstrating that safe, reliable infrastructure and frontier capabilities can go hand in hand.

The Systems engineering team owns compute uptime and resilience at massive scale, building the clusters, automation, and observability that make frontier AI research possible and safely deployable to customers. 

Team Matching: Team matching is determined after the interview process based on interview performance, interests, and business priorities. Please note we may also consider you for different Infrastructure teams. 

Responsibilities

• Lead infrastructure projects from design through delivery, owning scope, execution, and outcomes
• Build and maintain systems that support AI clusters at massive scale (thousands to hundreds of thousands of machines)
• Partner with cloud providers and internal teams to solve compute, networking, and reliability challenges
• Tackle difficult technical problems in your domain and proactively fill gaps in tooling, documentation, and processes
• Contribute to operational practices including incident response, postmortems, and on-call rotations

You may be a good fit if you

• Have 6+ years of software engineering experience
• Have led technical projects end-to-end over multiple months, including scoping, breaking down work, and driving delivery
• Have deep knowledge of distributed systems, reliability, and cloud platforms (Kubernetes, IaC, AWS/GCP)
• Are strong in at least one systems language (Python, Rust, Go, Java)
• Solve hard problems independently and know when to pull others in
• Help teammates grow through knowledge sharing and thoughtful technical guidance
• Communicate clearly in design docs, presentations, and cross-functional discussions

Strong candidates may have

• Security and privacy best practice expertise
• Experience with machine learning infrastructure like GPUs, TPUs, or Trainium, as well as supporting networking infrastructure like NCCL
• Low level systems experience, for example linux kernel tuning and eBPF 
• Technical expertise: Quickly understanding systems design tradeoffs, keeping track of rapidly evolving software systems

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

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed.  Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process