Staff Software Engineer, Claude Code

United States Digital Space LLC; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 625,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is seeking a Software Engineer to help build AI-powered developer tools. You will design scalable features across the stack and work with researchers to enhance model capabilities, prioritizing secure, usable tooling for the developer community.

The role requires 6+ years of experience, strong React development, and hands-on work with large language models, prompts, and tool orchestration. Hybrid in-office policy applies with visa sponsorship available.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of work experience in software engineering or related roles.
• Experience building developer tools and IDE integrations.
• Hands-on with large language models and prompt engineering.
• Strong React development and modern patterns (hooks, context, suspense).
• Experience with security, privacy, and compliance considerations.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable features and infrastructure for AI-powered development tools.
• Engage with developers inside and outside the company to gather insights and improve UX.
• Collaborate with researchers to improve model capabilities through tools and evals.
• Experiment with new tools and techniques to stay ahead of AI-assisted coding.
• Contribute across the stack from front-end to back-end to add features and fix issues.
• Explore Python notebooks, VS Code plug-ins, and containerized environments.

Skills

React development

Dev tools

LLMs & prompt engineering

Full-stack development

Security & compliance

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

VS Code extensions

Python notebooks

Container environments

Job description

About the company

the company’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.

At the company, we believe new AI capabilities are best achieved through secure foundations, not in spite of them. As capabilities grow more advanced, it is critical that progress moves forward safely and for the benefit of all society. It is the reason why security sits at the center of our work, and not as an afterthought.

We're specifically looking for a Software Engineer to help us build and maintain new agentic coding tools for developers. The ideal candidate will have a passion for developer tools, extensive knowledge of diverse programming environments and languages, and experience with advanced LLM features like tool‑use, chaining and orchestration patterns, and prompt engineering. Curiosity about AI research is a must!

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain scalable features and infrastructure for AI-powered development tools
• Engage directly with developers inside and outside the company to gather insights and improve user experience
• Collaborate with researchers to improve model capabilities through shared tools and evals
• Stay ahead of advancements in AI-assisted coding by experimenting with new tools, evaluating emerging techniques, and tracking enhancements to existing ones
• Contribute across the stack—from front-end UI to back-end infrastructure—to develop new features, fix bugs, and optimize performance
• Dive into possibly unfamiliar areas like Python notebooks, VS Code plug‑ins, and containerized environments.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Are excited about AI-assisted coding as a tool to enhance developer productivity and creativity—not replace human ingenuity
• Spend a lot of time refining and customizing your AI workflows
• Have experience building and maintaining dev tools
• Are an expert in React development, including performance optimization, modern patterns (hooks, context, suspense), and component architecture
• Specialize in user experience engineering but are a capable full stack developer
• Have hands‑on experience working with large language models and prompt engineering
• Have worked on projects with stringent safety, security and/or compliance requirements
• Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work
• Have 6+ years of work experience

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

• Building and maintaining CLI tools
• Working in large codebases and quickly jumping in to unfamiliar development environments
• Working with container orchestration and cloud infrastructure
• Scaling TypeScript projects
• Working with alternate JavaScript runtimes like Bun and Deno

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary: $320,000—$625,000 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.

We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At the company 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 the company, 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!

the company 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. Guidance on