Staff+ Software Engineer, Backend

Details

Anthropic is looking for experienced, product-minded backend engineers to own the systems powering user experiences across the API, Claude Code, and Claude.ai. The role involves independently scoping complex, multi-month projects, leading technical and product decisions, driving alignment across product, engineering, and research teams, and making architectural decisions for reliable and scalable systems serving hundreds of thousands of global users. Engineers remain hands-on with code and models while mentoring peers and improving team processes.

Team placement occurs after the interview process based on interests, experience, and organizational needs. Potential teams include Platform Intelligence, Platform Serving, Developer Experience, Agentic Systems, Auth & Identity, Platform Distribution, Enterprise Foundations, and Platform Safety.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale backend systems and APIs for Claude's products and developer platform.
• Own the performance, reliability, and efficiency of core serving infrastructure.
• Develop secure data access, retrieval, authentication, authorization, role-based access control, and single sign-on systems.
• Build developer tools, agent infrastructure, managed agents, tool-use primitives, durable sessions, environments, and long-running task execution capabilities.
• Develop cloud-native, cross-cloud, and enterprise-grade platform infrastructure with security, compliance, and operational capabilities.
• Build enterprise systems for permissions management, security, compliance, analytics, identity verification, and trust workflows.
• Partner with inference, safeguards, research, product, security, support, trust and safety, and engineering teams.
• Lead complex projects, influence technical decisions beyond the immediate team, and mentor peers.

Requirements

• 8+ years of relevant experience as a backend or product engineer.
• Track record of leading complex, multi-month projects or teams as a technical lead or equivalent.
• Strong coding fundamentals and experience working across backend systems, APIs, integrations, and, when needed, frontend systems.
• Experience designing and delivering large-scale production backend systems for highly adopted B2B or consumer-facing products.
• Strong communication and cross-functional alignment skills.
• Experience with distributed systems, API design, and cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Product-focused approach and ability to build robust, scalable, and easy-to-use solutions.
• Ability to work effectively in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience in a relevant field.

Compensation

• Annual salary: $405,000–$485,000 USD

Logistics and Benefits

• Hybrid policy: staff are expected to work from one of the company's offices at least 25% of the time; some roles may require more office time.
• Anthropic sponsors visas, although sponsorship cannot be guaranteed for every role or candidate. The company provides access to an immigration lawyer and makes reasonable efforts to obtain a visa for successful candidates.
• Benefits include competitive compensation, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and office collaboration spaces.