Staff+ Software Engineer, Auth & Identity

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 405,000 - 485,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity donation matching

Generous vacation

Parental leave

Flexible working hours

Office in San Francisco

Job summary

Anthropic is hiring for a senior backend/platform engineer focused on authentication, authorization, and identity. You will own critical systems across the Anthropic product suite, from Claude API to admin tooling, shaping security and access policies for humans, service accounts, and autonomous agents.

You will collaborate with product, security, and infrastructure teams to design scalable, resilient auth, with emphasis on reliability and global distribution.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and operating backend or platform systems at scale, with identity/auth emphasis.
• Experience with OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, JWTs, and policy engines (e.g., Cedar, OPA).
• Emphasis on reliability, security, on‑call readiness, and scalable auth systems.

Responsibilities

• Own high‑traffic identity/auth systems from design to rollout and operation.
• Architect unified authorization with low latency, multi‑region resilience.
• Lead migrations and deprecations of legacy paths with careful planning.
• Collaborate with product, security, and infra teams to set technical direction.

Skills

Backend systems

Auth & Identity

OAuth 2.0 / OIDC

RBAC / access control

Security reliability

Distributed systems

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Go

Python

Rust

TypeScript

Job description

About Anthropic

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About The Role

The Auth & Identity team builds the authentication, authorization, and identity platform that underpins every Anthropic product: the API, Claude Code, Claude.ai, and our Enterprise offerings. Every login, API key, OAuth token, access decision, and organization record flows through the systems we own. As Claude moves from a chat product to an agentic platform, we are defining what identity and access look like when the actor is a human, a service account, or an autonomous agent acting on someone's behalf.

We are a platform team with a product surface. The horizontal is the set of services every product consumes: credential minting and exchange, authorization controls, and the canonical record of users, service accounts, agents, and the organizations they belong to. The vertical is the experience where admins author that policy: SSO and SCIM setup, roles and permissions, IP allowlisting, and API key policies.

Our Work Falls Into Four Pillars

• Authentication – Who you are. Credential minting, exchange, and lifecycle; sessions; workload identity federation; auth for async and agentic workloads.
• Authorization – What you can do. The policy framework for model, membership, role, and resource access.
• Identity – Who belongs to what. The tenant and organization model, and first‑class identity for humans, service accounts, and agents, portable across surfaces and cloud environments.
• Enterprise – How enterprises connect. SSO, SCIM, login policies, and the admin controls that let customers provision and govern users from their own identity provider.

What you’ll do

You will own critical, high‑traffic systems end to end, from design through rollout, operations, and iteration, and help shape the technical strategy for how identity and access work across Anthropic. Representative problems we are working on right now:

• Designing credentials for agents and long‑running autonomous workloads.
• Routing every access decision through a unified authorization system, with low latency, security guarantees, and multi‑region resilience.
• Building a first‑class identity model for service accounts and agents, and linking those identities to other identity and auth systems.
• Global distribution and multi‑region failover for some of the company’s most mission‑critical services.
• Deepening enterprise integration: login policies and recovery methods, self‑service allowlisting, and tighter integrations with providers.

You will work closely with product, security, infrastructure, and the product teams that consume our primitives, and you will be expected to set technical direction, not just execute on it. Many of the problems are 0-to-1 with no established pattern to copy; others are careful migrations of systems that every Anthropic customer depends on in the hot path.

You might be a good fit if you

• Have 8+ years of experience building and operating backend or platform systems at scale, ideally including identity, authentication, authorization, or security‑adjacent infrastructure.
• Have worked with some of: OAuth 2.0 and OIDC, SAML, SCIM, JWTs and token exchange, workload identity federation, policy engines such as Cedar or OPA, or RBAC and resource‑level access control models.
• Care deeply about reliability and security. You design for on‑call, failure modes, revocation, and the engineer who inherits your system, and you treat availability of auth as table stakes for every product built on it.
• Are comfortable owning large migrations in live, high‑traffic systems: shadow modes, incremental rollouts, and clean retirement of legacy paths.
• Take a product‑focused approach to platform work and build primitives that are easy for other engineers to adopt correctly, with documentation and self‑service as part of the deliverable.
• Can navigate ambiguity and make sound technical decisions independently, and communicate clearly with cross‑functional partners and stakeholders.
• Are familiar with using AI tools as part of your software development workflow.

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience with globally distributed databases and multi‑region service architecture.
• Experience working in Go, Python, Rust, or TypeScript across a rapidly changing codebase.
• Prior work on enterprise identity integrations with major identity providers and cloud IAM systems.

Deadline to apply

None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

Location Preference

Preference will be given to candidates based in NY, SEA, SF or the Bay Area given the current location of team.

Annual Salary

$405,000—$485,000 USD

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: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship

We do sponsor visas! However, we aren’t able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

How We’re Different

We believe that the highest‑impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large‑scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long‑term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We’re an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest‑impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.
The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT‑3, Circuit‑Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues.

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