Staff Software Engineer, Claude Developer Platform (Backend)

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 is seeking talented and experienced Software Engineers to join our Claude Developer Platform team and help build the world's most trusted AI platform for developers. Since launch, the Claude API has seen rapid growth and adoption by companies of all sizes to build AI applications with our industry-leading models. The API serves as the primary channel for safely and broadly distributing AI's benefits across all sectors of the economy. You'll work on building and scaling frontier models and agentic capabilities while ensuring they're easy to use, safe, and provide a world-class developer experience.

We have multiple roles open on this team and are looking for experienced engineers at different stages in their career who are excited about this space and our mission. Team placement occurs after the interview process, taking into account your interests and experience alongside organizational needs. Here are some example teams:

• API Core: You’ll deliver reliable and performant foundational intelligence via the Claude API and help users get the most intelligence, speed, and value from our models. You’ll focus on launching new models and working with Inference and Research to bring new foundational capabilities to our users. You’ll do this while making sure our APIs are performant and reliable for all users from startups to enterprise.

• API Capabilities: You'll work on shipping the world's most intelligent and capable APIs, partnering directly with research to bring frontier capabilities to developers. This team owns core capabilities including vision, tool use, and computer use. Your work will directly impact how developers interact with our most advanced models.

• API Knowledge: You'll focus on transforming Claude into a true knowledge worker by ensuring the model has access to and understanding of the right knowledge at the right time. You'll work on making it possible for developers to securely give Claude access to their data while automatically processing and retrieving relevant information. You'll partner directly with research to bring state-of-the-art retrieval advancements to developers.

• Developer Experience: You’ll focus on building products and tools to enable developers to harness the full power of LLMs to create successful, reliable, and groundbreaking applications with ease. You’ll build the tools to accelerate developers from idea to deployment. You'll help figure out how to leverage Claude to improve developer's usage of the API, such as generating and evaluating prompts while collaborating closely with the teams above to bring Claude's current and future capabilities to developers.

• API Agents: You'll focus on building the infrastructure and APIs that enable developers to create powerful agentic applications within the Claude API. You'll help developers with agent orchestration through capabilities like tool use, multi-step reasoning, and long-running task execution that allow Claude to take actions and accomplish complex goals on behalf of users. You'll partner with research to bring cutting-edge agent capabilities to production.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement products that we launch in the Claude API, serving hundreds of thousands of developers
• Partner with research teams to productize cutting-edge model capabilities
• Participate in API design reviews to ensure consistent, intuitive developer experiences
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ship a world-class product
• Support and debug production issues through on-call rotations
• Design processes (e.g. postmortem review, incident response, on-call rotations) that help the team operate effectively and never fail the same way twice
• Partner with partner teams ensure sure new product features are integrated into the developer console in an intuitive way
• Use product sense to propose and implement improvements to the developer experience of using the API

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 8+ years of relevant industry experience, 3+ years leading large scale, complex projects or teams as an engineer or tech lead
• Are passionate about designing tasteful APIs and developer-focused products
• Enjoy talking directly with users and view "product" as part of your job
• Can work independently and thrive in a fast-paced environment
• Have deep expertise in distributed systems and API architecture
• Have excellent written and verbal communication skills to build consensus with stakeholders

Technical Stack

• Languages: Python, TypeScript
• Frameworks: FastAPI, React
• Infrastructure: GCP, Kubernetes, Cloud Run
• Databases: PostgreSQL (AlloyDB), Vector Stores, Firestore
• Tools: Feature Flagging, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog

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

Location Preference: Preference will be given to candidates based in New York or the San Francisco Bay Area as these positions are part of an SF- or NY-based team.

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