Staff Plus Software Engineer (Distributed Systems)

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Parental leave

Flexible PTO

Equity

Wellness stipend

Relocation support

Commuter benefits

Education stipend

Home office stipend

Meals in office

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking an experienced software engineer to join the Safeguards team in San Francisco. You will build distributed, scalable systems that detect unwanted model behaviors and prevent disallowed use of models, while interfacing with analysts through internal dashboards.

You will lead multi-month infrastructure projects, deploy monitoring across clouds, and harden sandboxed runtimes for AI agents, ensuring data residency, auditability, and cost efficiency.

Qualifications

• Experience with multi-cloud infrastructure and provider-agnostic designs.
• Proficiency in Python and distributed systems.
• Ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience with sandboxing and isolation technologies or systems language like Rust.
• Bachelor’s degree in CS/SE or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years in software engineering with production LLm-based agents experience.
• Experience with regulated or sensitive data handling and data residency.

Responsibilities

• Scope and lead multi-month infrastructure projects from design to production.
• Develop monitoring systems to detect unwanted model behaviors and surface in dashboards.
• Deploy monitoring across cloud environments with consistent pipelines and observability.
• Design sandboxed runtime for AI agents with strict isolation and audit logging.
• Manage cost and capacity for large volumes of agent work and meet SLOs.
• Collaborate with engineers, researchers, security, privacy, and legal teams.

Skills

Python

Distributed Systems

Infrastructure as Code

Strong communication

Sandboxing / isolation tech

Rust

Cloud experience

LLM-based agents in production

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD tooling

Containers

Job description

• We are looking for software engineers to help build safety and oversight mechanisms for our AI systems. As a software engineer on the Safeguards team, you will work to monitor models, prevent misuse, and ensure user well-being
• This role will focus on building distributed and scalable systems to detect unwanted model behaviors and prevent disallowed use of models. You will apply your technical skills to uphold our principles of safety, transparency, and oversight while enforcing our terms of service and acceptable use policies
• 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

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents
• Inclusive fertility benefits via Carrot Fertility
• 22 weeks of paid parental leave
• Flexible paid time off and absence policies
• Mental health support for you and your dependents
• Competitive salary and equity packages
• Optional equity donation matching at a 1:1 ratio, up to 25% of your equity grant
• Retirement plans with competitive matching
• Life and income protection plans
• $500/month flexible wellness and time saver stipend
• Commuter benefits
• Annual education stipend
• Home office stipends
• Relocation support for those moving for Anthropic
• Daily meals and snacks in the office

Qualifications

• Have worked across multiple cloud providers, or built infrastructure designed to be provider-agnostic
• Proficiency in Python, Distributed Systems, and Infrastructure as Code
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• Have experience with sandboxing and isolation technologies (containers, microVMs, network policy) or with a systems language such as Rust
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or comparable experience
• Have built and operated large-scale, distributed infrastructure, such as data platforms, control planes, or job schedulers
• We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed
• Have experience with integrity, spam, fraud, or abuse detection and mitigation
• 8+ years of experience in a software engineering position, not including internships
• Have experience running LLM-based agents in production
• Have built systems that handle sensitive or regulated data, with requirements around access control, auditability, retention, and data residency