Staff+ Software Engineer, Backend at Anthropic

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.

About the Role
Anthropic is looking for experienced, product-minded engineers to own the backend systems that power user experiences across our API, Claude Code, and Claude.ai. You'll independently scope complex, multi-month projects through ambiguous problem spaces and lead peers through technical and product decisions. You'll drive alignment with product, peer engineering teams, and research to identify capability gaps and translate frontier model improvements into shipped products. You'll make architectural decisions that affect the reliability and scalability of systems serving hundreds of thousands of global users, and design processes that help your team operate effectively.

Multiple teams are hiring. Team placement occurs after the interview process, taking into account your interests and experience alongside organizational needs:

API Core: Build and scale the foundation of the Claude API, the systems that deliver Claude's intelligence to every developer.

API Capabilities: Bring frontier model capabilities to developers through the Claude API, owning core features like vision, tool use, and computer use.

API Knowledge: Make it possible for developers to securely give Claude access to their data while automatically processing and retrieving relevant information. Partner directly with research to bring state-of-the-art retrieval advancements to developers.

Developer Experience: Build products and tools to enable developers to create reliable applications with Claude, accelerating them from idea to deployment.

API Agents: Build the infrastructure and APIs that enable developers to create powerful agentic applications within the Claude API. Help developers with agent orchestration through capabilities like tool use, multi-step reasoning, and long-running task execution.

Enterprise Foundations: Build the foundational systems that large organizations require before they can deploy AI at scale, including user and permissions management, security and compliance features, and analytics infrastructure.

You Might Be a Good Fit If You

Have 8+ years of relevant experience as a backend or product engineer, with a track record of leading complex, multi-month projects or teams as a tech lead or equivalent.

Have strong coding fundamentals and are comfortable working across backend systems, APIs, and integrations.

Have led the design and delivery of large-scale backend systems in production that power high-adoption B2B or consumer facing products.

Are skilled at driving alignment across technical and non-technical teams.

Have experience with distributed systems, API design, and cloud infrastructure at scale.

Thrive in fast-paced environments and can navigate ambiguity to find the highest-leverage path forward.

Strong Candidates May Also Have

Served as a technical lead or architect on a product or API platform.

Experience designing and scaling APIs with a focus on developer experience.

Deep experience building enterprise SaaS platforms.

Experience partnering with ML/AI research teams to productize model capabilities.

Experience building agentic systems, orchestration frameworks, or developer tools.

Annual Salary: $405,000 - $485,000 USD

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

Visa sponsorship: Yes, sponsorship is available.