Staff+ Software Engineer, Financial Fraud

Details

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

The Fraud Prevention team protects Anthropic's payment and monetization surfaces from financial abuse — keeping fraud losses, dispute rates, and network monitoring exposure in check while preserving a smooth experience for legitimate customers. As a software engineer on this team, you will build the systems that make risk decisions in real time, manage the dispute and chargeback lifecycle, and detect monetization abuse across subscriptions, in-app purchases, and promotions. The role requires seeing things from attackers' perspectives, anticipating responses to countermeasures, and minimizing false positives that impact paying customers.

Payments fraud work is externally coupled — you will collaborate closely with finance, support, and legal teams internally, and with payment processors and platform partners externally.

Responsibilities

• Design and build real-time risk decisioning that scores transactions at authorization time, balancing fraud loss, approval rates, and latency constraints
• Build tooling and automation for the dispute and chargeback lifecycle, from review queues to evidence collection and loss reporting
• Engineer fraud signals at scale — device fingerprinting, BIN and issuer signals, velocity features, and cross-account linkage — and detect monetization abuse across subscriptions, trials, promotions, and in-app purchases
• Own a portfolio of metrics — loss rate, dispute rate, authorization approval impact, and false-positive rate — rather than optimizing any single number
• Lead investigations into emerging fraud patterns, building multi-layered defenses designed for attacker adaptation rather than point-in-time rules
• Work cross-functionally with finance, support, legal, and data science, and with external payment processors and platform partners

Minimum Qualifications

• Proficiency in Python, SQL, and data analysis tools
• Experience building or operating fraud, risk, or abuse detection systems in production
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders

Preferred Qualifications

• 8+ years of industry software engineering experience, with a focus on payments fraud or risk
• Fluency with payments rails: card networks, payment service providers (e.g., Stripe, Adyen), in-app purchase platforms (Apple, Google), refund flows, and the chargeback and dispute lifecycle
• Direct experience combating fraud typologies such as card testing, stolen-card monetization, refund and chargeback abuse, subscription and trial abuse, promotional abuse, and friendly fraud
• Understanding of fraud loss accounting — fraud loss vs. dispute fees vs. card network monitoring programs (e.g., VDMP, iVFMP, Mastercard ECP) — and why chargeback rate thresholds carry existential stakes
• Experience building hybrid rules-and-ML risk systems: real-time scoring at authorization plus post-authorization review workflows
• Experience at a marketplace or subscription business, or on a processor-side or issuer-side risk team

Compensation

Annual Salary: $320,000 - $485,000 USD

Logistics

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
• Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
• Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.
• Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas. The posting states we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa and that Anthropic retains an immigration lawyer to help, though it notes sponsorship may not be possible for every role/candidate.

How we're different

We work as a single cohesive team on a few large-scale research efforts and value impact. The posting references recent research directions and emphasizes collaboration and communication skills.

Benefits

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