Senior Staff Engineer - Scalable Distributed Databases

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

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a Software Engineer for the Databases team to architect and operate the data layer powering Claude and AI research. You will shape database strategy, design scalable solutions, and support workloads across GCP, AWS, and diverse deployments.

Join a team responsible for billions of API requests, reliability, and performance at scale, collaborating with product and research to move fast.

Qualifications

• Significant experience building and operating production database or storage systems.
• Deep knowledge of distributed database architectures and OLTP at scale.
• Proficiency with SQL and major relational or distributed engines (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Spanner, CockroachDB, DynamoDB).
• Track record leading large infrastructure projects as an engineer or tech lead.
• Ability to balance speed with production reliability.
• Strong technical leadership and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Drive the technical direction for database solutions used across Product and Research.
• Design and implement scalable database solutions for millions of users.
• Build and scale database systems through 100x+ growth with reliability and performance.
• Architect data storage across GCP, AWS, and various deployments.
• Develop CDC-driven cache invalidation and data movement pipelines.
• Collaborate with product and research teams to accelerate data workflows.
• Optimize performance, reliability, and cost efficiency at scale.
• Make build-vs-buy decisions for database technologies.

Skills

Production databases

Distributed DB architectures

SQL proficiency

Technical leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

PostgreSQL

MySQL

Spanner

CockroachDB

DynamoDB

Redis

Temporal

Vector databases

Job description

Anthropic is seeking a Software Engineer for the Databases team to architect and operate the data layer powering Claude and AI research. You will shape database strategy, design scalable solutions, and support workloads across GCP, AWS, and diverse deployments.

Join a team responsible for billions of API requests, reliability, and performance at scale, collaborating with product and research to move fast.