Staff+ Software Engineer, Claude Design San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY

Anthropic Limited; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 405,000 - 485,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay

Equity matching

Generous vacation

Parental leave

Flexible hours

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking Software Engineers to help build Claude Design and the creative capabilities of Claude. You will craft the canvas, real-time editing, and AI-driven design experiences that users reach for first, while partnering with researchers and users to shape the product direction.

You’ll work on a small, autonomous team at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world application, delivering polished, production-ready features and exploring new design-tools capabilities.

Qualifications

• Experience with visual collaboration and creative tools.
• Experience with UI/UX for AI-powered apps and collaborating with designers.
• Frontend expertise in canvas rendering and editor UIs, design-system tooling, or graphics (WebGL/ shaders/ 3D/ animation).
• Experience with real-time, collaborative apps like multiplayer editing and WebSockets.
• Background in user research and usability testing.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship user-facing features across Claude Design products.
• Set technical direction for editor and canvas architecture, real-time collaboration, and import/export.
• Own the quality bar for look and feel, latency, responsiveness, and reliability.
• Partner with researchers to prototype experiences around vision and generation capabilities.
• Spend time with users and turn insights into what we build next.
• Build shared foundations to launch new creative tools quickly and integrate well with other products.
• Maintain strong craft, including interaction details, motion, and polish.
• Full-stack work on production frontend and backend for web products.
• Thrives in ambiguity with high agency and sound judgment.
• Advocate for ideas but adjust with evidence.
• Care for Anthropic's mission and societal impacts.

Skills

Visual collaboration

AI UI/UX

Frontend

Real-time collaboration

User research

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

WebGL

Shaders

WebSockets

Design-system tooling

Job description

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

Claude Design lets anyone collaborate with Claude to create polished visual work: interactive prototypes, product mockups, slides, and animations. We're making Claude the best visual storyteller there is, lowering the floor so anyone can bring an idea to life, and raising the ceiling on what the most skilled creators can make. We work on Artifacts in Claude, and so far we've shipped new kinds of artifacts like Claude Design, Slides, and Motion, and we are exploring new bets.

We're looking for Software Engineers to help build and shape Claude Design and the creative capabilities of Claude. This is a craft-heavy, product engineering 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.

You’ll join a small, fast-moving team with high autonomy. If you’re a strong design engineer who loves building visual products and likes to sweat the details, we’d love to hear from you.

Key responsibilities

Build and ship user-facing features across our products, and help decide which creative spaces we explore next

Set technical direction for these products, including editor and canvas architecture, real-time collaboration, and rich import and export

Own the quality bar for how these products look and feel, treating latency, responsiveness, and reliability as first-class concerns and raising user experience and design considerations early

Partner with researchers to rapidly prototype experiences around vision and generation capabilities, and help improve the quality of what Claude generates

Spend time with users and dig into how people actually use what you ship, then turn what you learn into what we build next

Build the shared foundations that let us launch new creative tools quickly and make them work well together

Strong design sensibility and a high bar for craft, including attention to interaction details, motion, and polish

Strong full-stack engineering skills, including production frontend and backend work on user-facing web products

Ability to thrive in ambiguity and be energized by uncertainty

High agency, good judgment about what matters, and a bias toward shipping

A deeply user-centric approach: you validate ideas with actual users before over-investing and talk about problems before solutions

Strong opinions held loosely: you advocate forcefully for ideas but change your mind based on evidence

Care for Anthropic's mission and the societal impacts of your work

Preferred qualifications

Extensive experience working with or building visual collaboration and creative tools

Experience with UI and UX for AI-powered applications, and fluency collaborating closely with designers

Deep frontend expertise in canvas rendering, complex editor UIs, design-system tooling, or graphics work, such as WebGL, shaders, 3D, or animation

Experience with real-time, collaborative applications, such as multiplayer editing and WebSockets

Background conducting user research, interviews, and usability testing

Experience building and shipping products from 0 to 1

Experience building product platforms, primitives, or shared foundations that other products and teams build on top of

Performance optimization experience, such as profiling, improving rendering, and tracing end-to-end latency

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.

$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.

For roles performing work in California: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records or criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.

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. Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you [e-mail] addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

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.