Staff+ Software Engineer, Caching

Details

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The company is seeking experienced engineers to build Anthropic's cache layer as a managed service from the ground up. The Caching team (part of the Databases organization) owns systems that keep Anthropic's hottest paths fast and correct: a managed Redis fleet, client libraries used across the company, and CDC-driven cache invalidation.

This is a foundational role on a small team with outsized leverage. You will set the technical direction for caching at Anthropic, working from the data plane to developer experience, and partner closely with product and research teams.

Responsibilities

• Drive the technical direction for caching infrastructure used across Product and Research
• Design, build, and operate a managed Redis fleet that scales to support millions of users across Claude's product ecosystem
• Build client libraries and developer-facing abstractions that make correct caching the default for Anthropic engineers
• Design and operate CDC-driven cache invalidation to keep cached data consistent with source-of-truth databases
• Architect caching solutions that operate across GCP, AWS, first-party deployments, and other environments
• Optimize latency, hit rates, reliability, and cost efficiency on Anthropic's hottest paths
• Build observability and tooling to make cache behavior easy to understand and debug
• Partner with product and research teams to understand access patterns and accelerate their work
• Make build-vs-buy decisions for caching technologies

Requirements

Minimum qualifications:

• Significant experience as a software engineer building and operating production distributed systems
• Deep knowledge of caching architectures, including invalidation strategies, consistency tradeoffs, and failure modes
• Experience operating Redis, Memcached, or similar in-memory data stores in production
• Proficiency in at least one systems programming language (e.g., Go, Rust, Java, C++) or Python at scale
• Track record of leading large, complex infrastructure projects as an engineer or tech lead
• Ability to balance moving quickly with the reliability needs of production systems
• Strong technical leadership and cross-functional collaboration skills

Preferred qualifications:

• 10+ years building and scaling distributed infrastructure, with 3+ years leading large-scale projects or teams
• Experience building managed infrastructure platforms or internal services consumed by many engineering teams
• Experience with change data capture (Debezium or similar) or streaming data infrastructure
• Experience operating Redis Cluster, Valkey, ElastiCache, Memorystore, or similar managed offerings at scale
• Experience designing client libraries or SDKs for internal infrastructure
• Experience scaling infrastructure through periods of rapid growth at high-growth companies
• Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid cloud deployments
• Contributions to caching systems, database internals, or related open source projects

Logistics

• Annual salary range: $320,000 - $485,000 USD
• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Location-based hybrid policy: staff are expected to be in an office at least ~25% of the time (some roles may require more)
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic states that they do sponsor visas and retain an immigration lawyer to assist

How we're different

Anthropic emphasizes large-scale, collaborative AI research and values communication skills. The role does not require prior AI/ML infrastructure experience; deep infrastructure expertise from any domain is valued.

Additional information

The posting includes recruiting and application guidance, voluntary self-identification forms, and links to candidate AI usage guidance and company research resources.