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 our 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

We are looking for backend / platform software engineers to join our Product Foundations org. We build foundational primitives that help accelerate product development across Anthropic. Some examples of what we own and maintain are our core sampling pipeline, our rate limiting platform, and our RAG platform.

We have multiple teams that are currently hiring. Team placement occurs after the interview process, taking into account your interests and experience alongside organizational needs. This flexible approach allows us to match talented engineers with the platform efforts where they'll have the greatest impact and growth potential:

Platform Accel: We work on maximizing the developer productivity of product engineers at Anthropic. You'll architect and optimize the critical development infrastructure that powers our AI product development, including dev environments, developer tooling, and CI/CD pipelines. You’ll partner closely with product teams to understand their development workflow and eliminate friction points. Your work will have an extraordinary multiplier effect, enhancing productivity across our entire product organization and accelerating our mission.

Service Infra: we build and maintain the core infrastructure that powers Anthropic's engineering organization, from service mesh and observability systems to deployment pipelines and shared libraries. Our work enables product teams to build and operate reliable services at scale, making us a critical force multiplier across the entire company.

Multicloud: We build and maintain the infrastructure that enables Anthropic to operate across multiple cloud providers. We focus on cloud-agnostic tooling, cross-cloud networking, and multi-region deployments.

Auth & Identity: We build and maintain the critical infrastructure that powers identity and authentication across Anthropic's product suite. We work closely with product teams, security, support, and trust & safety as customers. We create scalable solutions for user authentication, authorization, role-based access control, and single sign-on that form the backbone of our company's identity management operations. We maintain a user-centric approach, building reliable systems that our users and company can depend on as we tackle complex challenges at the intersection of security, scalability, and user experience.

Connectivity: We build the infrastructure that enables Claude to safely interact with the outside world through the use of tools. Our team owns the platform that provides secure, isolated execution environments as well as the infrastructure that connects Claude to external services via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). You'll work on challenging problems at the intersection of security and capability: designing sandboxes that are both secure and performant, building reliable MCP infrastructure, and expanding our platform for enterprise deployments. We collaborate closely with product teams across Claude.ai, API, and Claude Code to deliver the execution capabilities that make Claude genuinely useful for real-world tasks. Relevant experience includes containerization, secure execution environments, and developing for enterprise requirements.

Responsibilities:

Build and scale platform components to handle Anthropic’s rapid growth
Design and architect platform components that are composable and deliver value for a variety of use cases
Collaborate closely with product teams to understand their needs and build platform capabilities that accelerate their feature delivery
Make build vs buy decisions, evaluating and implementing 3rd party solutions when most impactful
Set technical direction and vision for various product and platform features
Partner with research to quickly prototype and launch new capabilities based on research breakthroughs

You might be a good fit if you:

Have 6+ years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer building scalable distributed systems
Have strong coding skills and experience with service-oriented architectures
Have worked in early start-up or otherwise fast moving, rapidly evolving environments, and have ideally built products from 0 to 1
Take full ownership of your work, navigate ambiguity effectively, and proactively overcome obstacles to deliver results
Are comfortable diving into any part of the system, whether it's infrastructure, services, or product frontends, to deliver effective solutions
Enjoy working with a fast-paced team tackling cutting-edge problems in AI safety and conversational AI
Take a product-focused approach and care about building solutions that are robust, scalable, and easy to use
Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
Have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or comparable experience

Strong candidates may also:

Have worked with NLP and ML models and understand their capabilities and limitations
Have experience with REST APIs
Have experience with React and Frontend frameworks

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$320,000—$405,000 USD

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.**

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

Software Engineer, Platform