Staff+ Software Engineer, Backend

Details

Anthropic is building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. This Staff+ Backend role owns backend systems that power user experiences across the API, Claude Code, and Claude.ai. You will independently scope complex, multi-month projects through ambiguous problem spaces, lead peers through technical and product decisions, drive alignment with product and research teams, and make architectural decisions that affect reliability and scalability for hundreds of thousands of global users.

Responsibilities

• Own and ship backend systems and platform features that power Claude’s API and consumer products.
• Scope and deliver complex, multi-month projects; act as a technical lead and influence cross-team decisions.
• Make architectural decisions to improve performance, reliability, and scalability of core serving paths and developer-facing features.
• Partner closely with research, inference, safeguards, and product teams to productionize model capabilities and translate model improvements into product features.
• Build systems for capabilities such as vision, tool use, knowledge/retrieval, agent orchestration, and developer experience.
• Design operational processes (incident response, on-call rotations, postmortem review) and processes that improve team reliability.

Requirements

• 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.
• Strong coding fundamentals and comfortable working across backend systems, APIs, and integrations; able to reach into frontend when needed.
• Experience designing and delivering large-scale backend systems in production that power high-adoption B2B or consumer-facing products.
• Experience with distributed systems, API design, and cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Strong communication skills; ability to drive alignment across technical and non-technical teams and mentor peers.
• Product-focused mindset with attention to building robust, scalable, and easy-to-use solutions.

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Served as a technical lead or architect on a product or API platform, owning technical vision and execution end-to-end.
• Experience designing and scaling APIs with a focus on developer experience, including API design review processes.
• Deep experience building enterprise SaaS platforms (permissions infrastructure, billing/pricing systems, compliance frameworks such as SOC2 or HIPAA).
• Background in industry verticals (financial services, healthcare, legal) building products handling sensitive data.
• Experience partnering with ML/AI research teams to productize model capabilities and address model failure modes in production.
• Experience building agentic systems, orchestration frameworks, developer tools (CLI, IDE integrations), or AI-assisted coding environments.
• Experience instrumenting adoption funnels and designing operational processes for large-scale developer or enterprise audiences.

Compensation

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

Logistics

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.
• Minimum years of experience: Correlates with internal job level requirements.
• Location-based hybrid policy: staff are expected to be in one of Anthropic’s offices at least 25% of the time (some roles may require more).
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic states they do sponsor visas and retain an immigration lawyer to assist, though they cannot guarantee sponsorship for every role/candidate.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and office space to collaborate.

How We're Different

• Anthropic emphasizes large-scale collaborative AI research and values communication, impact, and cross-team collaboration. They publish research and prioritize bringing frontier model capabilities into product.