Staff+ Software Engineer, Databases

Details

Anthropic is seeking experienced engineers to build and scale the database infrastructure powering Claude's products and Anthropic's research. The role involves architecting and operating systems that support millions of users, billions of API requests, frontier AI research workloads, and deployments across GCP, AWS, first-party, and third-party environments.

The Databases team works across the core database platform, data movement, and caching infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Drive the technical direction for database solutions used across Product and Research.
• Design and implement database solutions that scale to support millions of users across Claude's product ecosystem.
• Build and scale database systems through 100x+ growth while maintaining reliability and performance.
• Build a database platform that allows Anthropic engineers to ship without managing database scaling concerns.
• Architect data storage solutions operating across GCP, AWS, first-party deployments, third-party deployments, and other environments.
• Develop database infrastructure for product and research workloads with different performance characteristics.
• Build data movement infrastructure, including migration tooling, backfill, and change data capture pipelines.
• Design and operate caching infrastructure, including CDC-driven cache invalidation.
• Partner with product and research teams to understand data requirements and build infrastructure that accelerates their work.
• Optimize database performance, reliability, and cost efficiency at scale.
• Make build-versus-buy decisions for database technologies.

Requirements

• Significant experience building and operating production database or storage systems as a software engineer.
• Deep knowledge of distributed database architectures and OLTP systems at scale.
• Proficiency with SQL and at least one major relational or distributed database engine, such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Spanner, CockroachDB, or DynamoDB.
• A track record of leading large, complex infrastructure projects as an engineer or technical lead.
• Ability to balance rapid development with production reliability requirements.
• Strong technical leadership and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• A bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience in a relevant field, as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience building and scaling database systems, including 3+ years leading large-scale projects or teams.
• Experience scaling databases through periods of rapid growth at high-growth companies.
• Production experience with Spanner, CockroachDB, TiDB, AlloyDB, or other globally distributed SQL databases.
• Experience with Redis, Temporal, vector databases, or asynchronous job-processing frameworks.
• Experience with change data capture, such as Debezium or similar tools, large-scale data migration, or streaming data infrastructure.
• Experience building multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud database solutions.
• Knowledge of database orchestration and automation at scale.
• Contributions to database internals, storage engines, or related open-source projects.

Prior AI/ML infrastructure experience is not required; deep infrastructure and database expertise from any domain is valued.

Benefits

Anthropic offers competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and office spaces for collaboration. Anthropic sponsors visas where possible and retains an immigration lawyer to provide assistance.

The role follows a location-based hybrid policy. Staff are currently expected to work from one of Anthropic's offices at least 25% of the time, although some roles may require more office time.