Staff+ Software Engineer, Privacy

Details

Anthropic is building frontier AI systems that handle sensitive information at enormous scale. This role will help establish the privacy engineering function and shape how privacy is designed into AI systems from the ground up. The position sits within the Data Infrastructure team and focuses on privacy-preserving systems, privacy-enhancing technologies, and technical leadership across engineering, research, and product teams.

The role operates at the intersection of privacy engineering, AI safety, and distributed systems. It is a senior individual contributor position with high autonomy and broad influence.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement privacy-preserving architectures for large-scale AI training and inference systems using techniques such as differential privacy, federated learning, and secure multi-party computation.
• Partner with researchers to implement privacy-preserving training methods that protect user data while maintaining model quality.
• Build foundational privacy infrastructure, including automated data discovery, classification, access controls, audit logging, and lifecycle management.
• Translate regulatory requirements, including GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and the EU AI Act, into technical implementations and automated compliance controls.
• Architect data governance systems for tracking data lineage, purpose limitation, and retention across distributed AI systems.
• Lead privacy reviews and threat modeling for new models and features, identifying risks and designing scalable mitigations.
• Partner with product and infrastructure teams to embed privacy controls into Claude's inference systems, user interfaces, and data pipelines.
• Develop privacy engineering toolkits and frameworks that enable engineers to build privacy-preserving features by default.
• Design privacy-preserving analytics and measurement systems that provide useful insights without exposing individual user data.
• Evaluate emerging privacy technologies from academia and industry, and contribute to open-source tooling and AI privacy standards.
• Advise on and advocate for privacy practices as a core part of Anthropic's approach to AI safety.

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience applying privacy engineering principles in production systems, including privacy by design, data minimization, and purpose limitation.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or similar programming languages, with experience building and operating production systems at scale.
• Experience designing and implementing privacy infrastructure for systems with a large user base.
• Experience with data governance, classification, or data lifecycle management systems.
• Understanding of privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, with the ability to translate legal requirements into technical designs.
• Experience conducting privacy reviews, threat modeling, or risk assessments.
• Written and verbal communication skills sufficient to build alignment across engineering, research, legal, and product teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with privacy-enhancing technologies such as differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, secure enclaves, and secure multi-party computation.
• Experience building privacy infrastructure or controls for machine learning or AI systems.
• Experience establishing a privacy engineering practice or being an early hire in a function.
• Experience with distributed systems and cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Experience serving as a technical lead on complex, multi-quarter projects.
• Contributions to open-source privacy tooling, privacy research, or industry standards.
• 12+ years of experience in a software engineering role, including building and operating large-scale infrastructure.
• 3+ years of experience leading large, complex projects as a technical lead.

Education and 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: Staff are expected to be in one of Anthropic's offices at least 25% of the time, although some roles may require more time in the office.
• Anthropic sponsors visas and states that it will make every reasonable effort to obtain a visa for candidates who receive an offer, 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.