Senior Database Engineer — Scale & Multi-Cloud Systems

Anthropic Limited; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 485,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity donation matching

Generous vacation

Parental leave

Flexible working hours

Office space

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking experienced software engineers to design and operate the database infrastructure powering Claude and research workloads. You will shape the data layer, storage strategies, and scalable systems across GCP, AWS, and various deployment models to support billions of API requests and research workloads.

You will lead on building a reliable data platform, drive performance, cost efficiency, and cross-functional collaboration with product and research teams.

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.
• 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.

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 that safely consolidates and moves data across the organization.
• Design and operate caching infrastructure, including CDC-driven cache invalidation, that keeps Anthropic's hottest paths fast and correct.
• 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.

Skills

Distributed databases

SQL proficiency

Leadership

Production databases

Cloud deployments

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field

Tools

Spanner

CockroachDB

TiDB

AlloyDB

Job description

Anthropic is seeking experienced software engineers to design and operate the database infrastructure powering Claude and research workloads. You will shape the data layer, storage strategies, and scalable systems across GCP, AWS, and various deployment models to support billions of API requests and research workloads.

You will lead on building a reliable data platform, drive performance, cost efficiency, and cross-functional collaboration with product and research teams.