Staff+ Software Engineer, Databases

at Anthropic

📍 New York City, United States
📍 San Francisco, United States
📍 Seattle, United States

USD 320,000-485,000 per year

SENIOR

✅ Hybrid

✅ Visa Sponsorship

Used Tools & Technologies

Not specified

Required Skills & Competences
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

MySQL @ 6 Redis @ 4 SQL @ 6 GCP @ 4 Leadership @ 7 AWS @ 4 PostgreSQL @ 6 API @ 4 Technical Leadership @ 7 AI @ 4

Details

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The Databases team builds and scales the database infrastructure that powers Claude's products and Anthropic's research. Engineers on this team design systems to handle billions of API requests, build storage that runs across GCP and AWS and varied deployment models, and create reliable data layers for both product and research workloads.

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 the database platform that lets Anthropic engineers ship without thinking about databases or scaling
Architect data storage solutions that operate across GCP, AWS, first-party deployments, third-party deployments, and other environments
Develop database infrastructure that serves both product and research workloads with different performance characteristics
Build data movement infrastructure (migration tooling, backfill, and change data capture pipelines) that safely consolidates and moves data across the organization
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-vs-buy decisions for database technologies

Requirements

Minimum qualifications:

Significant experience as a software engineer building and operating production database or storage systems
Deep knowledge of distributed database architectures and OLTP systems at scale
Proficiency with SQL and at least one major relational or distributed database engine (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, Spanner, CockroachDB, DynamoDB)
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 database systems, with 3+ years leading large-scale projects or teams
Experience scaling databases through periods of rapid growth at high-growth companies
Experience operating Spanner, CockroachDB, TiDB, AlloyDB, or other globally distributed SQL databases in production
Experience with Redis, Temporal, vector databases, or async job processing frameworks
Experience with change data capture (Debezium or similar), 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

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
Location-based hybrid policy: currently, staff are expected to be in one of Anthropic's offices at least 25% of the time (some roles may require more time in office)
Deadline to apply: None (applications reviewed on a rolling basis)
Visa sponsorship: Anthropic states they do sponsor visas and retain an immigration lawyer to help with sponsorship when an offer is made

Benefits

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