Staff Distributed Systems Engineer, AI Safety & Oversight

Socket.dev; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 485,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking software engineers to build safety and oversight mechanisms for our AI systems. As a software engineer on the Safeguards team, you will monitor models, prevent misuse, and ensure user well-being.

This role focuses on distributed, scalable systems to detect unwanted model behaviors and prevent disallowed use, applying your skills to uphold safety, transparency, and policy enforcement. You'll collaborate with researchers, security, privacy, and legal teams to ship new

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or comparable experience
• Proficiency in Python, Distributed Systems, and Infrastructure as Code
• Have worked across multiple cloud providers, or built infrastructure designed to be provider-agnostic
• Have built and operated large-scale, distributed infrastructure, such as data platforms, control planes, or job schedulers
• Have experience with sandboxing and isolation technologies (containers, microVMs, network policy) or with a systems language such as Rust
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders

Responsibilities

• Independently scope and lead complex, multi-month infrastructure projects, from an ambiguous starting point through to a production system
• Develop monitoring systems to detect unwanted behaviors from our API partners and potentially take automated enforcement actions; surface these in internal dashboards to analysts for manual review
• Stand up and run deployments of those monitoring systems across multiple clouds, including inside cloud-provider partner environments where data residency laws apply. Keep the deployments consistent through shared deployment pipelines, smoke tests, observability, and alerting
• Design and harden the sandboxed runtime that AI agents execute in: isolation, network egress controls, least-privilege data access, audit logging, and insider-risk controls
• Manage cost and capacity for large volumes of long-running agent work, and set and meet service-level objectives for the platform
• Partner with the engineers and researchers who write and evaluate the monitoring agents, and with security, privacy, and legal teams, so new detection work can ship quickly on a platform everyone trusts

Skills

Python

Distributed systems

Infrastructure as Code

Cloud providers

Sandboxing / isolation

Systems design

Strong communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related

Tools

Rust

Containers

Kubernetes

Job description

Anthropic is seeking software engineers to build safety and oversight mechanisms for our AI systems. As a software engineer on the Safeguards team, you will monitor models, prevent misuse, and ensure user well-being.

This role focuses on distributed, scalable systems to detect unwanted model behaviors and prevent disallowed use, applying your skills to uphold safety, transparency, and policy enforcement. You'll collaborate with researchers, security, privacy, and legal teams to ship new