Staff Software Engineer, Claude Design

Details

Anthropic is building Claude Design, a product that lets users collaborate with Claude to create polished visual work, including interactive prototypes, product mockups, slides, one-pagers, and marketing collateral. The role focuses on building AI-driven design experiences at the intersection of frontier research and real-world applications.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship Claude Design's core surfaces, including the design canvas, real-time editing, inline comments, and live adjustment controls.
• Collaborate with research teams to turn generation capabilities into intuitive, high-craft design experiences.
• Work directly with designers, internal test users, and external partners to gather feedback, iterate quickly, and validate product concepts.
• Set technical direction for frontend challenges involving editor and canvas architecture, real-time collaboration, design-system inference, rich import/export, and performance.
• Design and run experiments to test product hypotheses, including user prototype tests and evaluations of generation quality.
• Own the product quality bar, with a focus on latency, responsiveness, reliability, user experience, and design.
• Strengthen the handoff to Claude Code so designs translate cleanly into production, and provide research feedback about model effectiveness and capability gaps.
• Operate as a technical leader on a small team, shape the roadmap with design and product, make pragmatic architecture decisions, and mentor engineers.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience building full-stack applications, with deep frontend expertise and a track record of zero-to-one work in startup or startup-like environments.
• Experience setting technical direction and mentoring engineers while remaining hands-on in code.
• Strong design sensibility and a high bar for interaction details, motion, and polish.
• Strong technical skills across modern web stacks such as React, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, and Go, including complex client-side state, performance, APIs, databases, and cloud technologies.
• Ability to work in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift and rapid delivery is important.
• User-centric approach, including validating ideas with users before making significant investments.
• Ability to work as a generalist across frontend, backend, and product problems.
• Independent judgment, effective communication, and the ability to translate complex AI capabilities into intuitive experiences.
• Awareness of the societal impacts and ethics of AI-related work.
• A bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience. The relevant field of study may be demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or working with visual collaboration and creative tools such as Figma, Canva, or Adobe Creative Cloud.
• Hands-on UI/UX experience for AI-powered applications and close collaboration with designers.
• Experience conducting user research, interviews, and usability testing.
• Frontend expertise in canvas rendering, complex editor interfaces, design-system tooling, or graphics work such as WebGL, shaders, 3D, or animation.
• Experience with real-time collaborative applications, multiplayer editing, WebSockets, or complex high-performance frontend interactions.

Candidates do not need to have every listed skill, formal certifications or education credentials, or direct machine learning or AI research experience.

Compensation

• Annual salary: $320,000–$485,000 USD.
• Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis; there is no application deadline.

Work Policy and Visa Information

• Hybrid policy: Staff are expected to work from one of the company's offices at least 25% of the time, although some roles may require more office time.
• Anthropic sponsors visas for this role when possible and makes reasonable efforts to obtain a visa for successful candidates, with support from an immigration lawyer.

Benefits

Anthropic offers competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and office space for collaboration.