Staff Software Engineer, Claude Design

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

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working hours

Generous vacation and parental leave

Office in San Francisco

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a software engineer to help build Claude Design, a frontend-heavy product for real‑time collaboration and AI‑driven design. You’ll craft the canvas, live editing, and design-system inference, and partner with researchers and designers to turn ideas into tangible experiences.

This role demands strong frontend expertise, comfort with complex UI, and the ability to ship early and iterate. You’ll set technical direction, mentor others, and ensure latency and polish meet high

Qualifications

• Strong frontend and full-stack capability with frontend-heavy focus.
• Experience shipping production-grade UI/UX for complex apps.
• Ability to mentor and lead while staying hands-on in code.

Responsibilities

• Build Claude Design's core surfaces (canvas, live editing, comments).
• Collaborate with researchers and designers to translate vision into product.
• Set technical direction and mentor engineers as the team grows.
• Run experiments to validate product hypotheses and measure performance.

Skills

React

TypeScript

Node.js

Python

Go

Frontend architecture

Real-time collaboration

Canvas rendering

UI/UX for AI

Design-system tooling

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

WebSockets

WebGL

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

At Anthropic, we're building AI systems that are safe, beneficial, and transformative. Our mission is to develop AI that benefits humanity, and we believe the most powerful capabilities emerge when we thoughtfully bridge the gap between research breakthroughs and real-world applications. Claude Design is the newest product from Anthropic Labs, the internal accelerator behind Claude Code and MCP. It lets anyone collaborate with Claude to create polished visual work: interactive prototypes, product mockups, slides, one-pagers, and marketing collateral. Start from a prompt, an image, or your own codebase, and Claude builds a first version that you refine through conversation, inline comments, direct edits, and live adjustment controls, then hand off to Claude Code to build for real. We launched in research preview in April 2026, and the product is new enough that the engineers who join now will define what it becomes. We're looking for Software Engineers to help build and shape Claude Design. This is a craft-heavy, frontend-leaning role: you'll create the canvas, real-time editing, design-system inference, and AI-driven generation experiences that make AI-generated design feel like a tool people reach for first— not a demo. You'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world application, rapidly building and testing new experiences, partnering directly with researchers and users, and helping to generate the crucial insights that shape where the product goes next.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship Claude Design's core surfaces (the design canvas, real-time editing, inline comments, and the live adjustment controls Claude generates), shipping early and often to maximize learning
• Collaborate closely with research teams to turn frontier vision and generation capabilities into intuitive, high-craft design experiences
• Work directly with designers, internal test users, and external partners to gather feedback, iterate quickly, and validate (or invalidate) product concepts
• Set technical direction for the hardest frontend problems: editor and canvas architecture, real-time collaboration, design-system inference, rich import/export, and performance as the product scales
• Design and run experiments to test product hypotheses, from prototype tests with users to evaluations of generation quality, balancing creative exploration with rigorous measurement
• Own the quality bar for how the product looks and feels, treating latency, responsiveness, and reliability as first-class concerns rather than afterthoughts, and advocate for user experience and design considerations early in the process
• Strengthen the handoff to Claude Code so designs translate cleanly into production, and feed insights back to research about model effectiveness and where capabilities can improve
• Operate as a technical leader on a small team: shape the roadmap alongside design and product, make pragmatic architecture decisions, and mentor engineers as the team grows

You may be a good fit if

• Have 8+ years of experience building full-stack applications with deep frontend strength, and a track record of zero-to-one work in startup or startup-like environments
• Have set technical direction for a team or workstream and mentored other engineers, while staying hands-on in the code
• Have strong design sensibility and a high bar for craft; you sweat interaction details, motion, and polish
• Have strong technical skills across modern web stacks (React, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Go, etc.), including complex client-side state, performance, APIs, databases, and cloud technologies
• Are comfortable working in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift and shipping quickly matters
• Are deeply user-centric: you enjoy validating ideas with actual users before over-investing and you talk about problems before solutions
• Hold strong opinions loosely: you advocate forcefully for ideas but change your mind based on evidence
• Are a generalist who can move comfortably between frontend, backend, and product problems as the work demands
• Work independently with good judgment about what matters, without needing constantly direction
• Communicate effectively and translate complex AI capabilities into intuitive experiences
• Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work

Strong candidates may also have

• Extensive experience working with or building visual collaboration & creative tools (e.g., Figma, Canva, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc), and have strong opinions on how they could become more magical experiences
• Hands‑on experience with UI/UX for AI-powered applications, and fluency collaborating closely with designers
• Background conducting user research, interviews, and usability testing
• Deep frontend expertise in canvas rendering, complex editor UIs, design-system tooling, or graphics work (WebGL/shaders, 3D, animation)
• Experience with real-time, collaborative applications (multiplayer editing, WebSockets) or complex, high-performance frontend interactions

Candidates need not have

• 100% of the skills listed above
• Formal certifications or education credentials
• Direct machine learning or AI research experience

Annual Salary

$320,000—$485,000 USD

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.

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 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. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. 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 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. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.