Software Engineer, Research Infrastructure

Details

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The Research Productivity organization builds the infrastructure and systems that accelerate research across Anthropic, including tools that help the research process get faster and more effective over time.

This role joins a team that operates like a startup within a startup, focused on iterating fast on infrastructure while tackling reliability and scalability challenges as research products and workloads evolve. The engineer will scope complex, multi-month projects, drive cross-organizational alignment, make architectural decisions, and partner directly with researchers to design and scale infrastructure that keeps pace with growing demand.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and scale infrastructure and systems that support rapidly increasing usage as requirements and workloads evolve
• Independently scope and lead complex, multi-month engineering projects from an ambiguous starting point to production
• Drive cross-organizational alignment on technical direction and work through ambiguous problem spaces with multiple stakeholders
• Make architectural decisions that shape the foundation of research infrastructure and tooling across Anthropic
• Partner directly with researchers to deeply understand their workflows and anticipate how those needs will change
• Iterate quickly, favor pragmatic, first-principles solutions and fast feedback loops over heavy upfront design
• Take ownership of the reliability and scalability of critical systems as load, usage, and complexity increase
• Help set technical standards and best practices for the team, and mentor other engineers

Requirements (Minimum Qualifications)

• Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or infrastructure in production
• A track record of independently scoping and delivering complex, ambiguous, multi-month technical projects
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and hands-on coding ability
• Experience making architectural decisions that other engineers and teams build on top of
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience driving alignment across multiple teams or stakeholders
• Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in ambiguous, fast-changing environments

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience building infrastructure or platforms specifically for research or machine learning workflows
• Direct experience navigating the reliability and architectural challenges that come with rapidly scaling systems
• Experience with distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and infrastructure-as-code
• Familiarity with the compute, tooling, and workflow needs of large-scale machine learning research
• Experience operating in a startup or startup-like environment (small, fast-moving team with high autonomy)
• Prior experience as a technical lead or mentor for other engineers

Compensation

• Annual Salary: $405,000 - $625,000 USD

Logistics

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Location-based hybrid policy: staff expected to be in one of Anthropic's offices at least 25% of the time (some roles may require more time in offices)
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic states they do sponsor visas and retain an immigration lawyer to help, but sponsorship availability may vary by role and candidate

How we're different

Anthropic focuses on large-scale AI research, working as a cohesive team on a few major research efforts and valuing communication and collaboration across research and engineering. The company emphasizes impact on long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI and encourages applications from diverse backgrounds.