Staff Software Engineer, Developer Productivity (Dev Environments) - Claude Code

United States Digital Space LLC; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 405,000 - 485,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to manage the entire development environment for effective AI safety. Your role will include designing the environment isolation model and collaborating with various teams to ensure seamless operation.

The ideal candidate should have substantial software engineering experience, especially in backend and infrastructure, with a strong proficiency in Python and containerization tools. The position offers competitive compensation ranging from $405,000 to $485,000 USD annually.

Qualifications

• Significant professional software engineering experience in backend or developer infrastructure domains.
• Proficiency in Python.
• Hands-on experience with containers (Docker or equivalent) and Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Own the local and hosted development environment end to end.
• Design and implement the environment isolation model.
• Partner with platform, delivery infrastructure, and tooling teams.

Skills

Proficiency in Python

Hands-on experience with containers (Docker or equivalent)

Experience with Kubernetes

Significant professional software engineering experience

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

Bazel

Buck

Nix

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.

About the role

Every minute an the company engineer or researcher spends waiting on a container to boot, a dependency to resolve, or CI to surface a failure that could have been caught locally is a minute not spent on frontier AI safety. The Developer Productivity team owns the inner development loop for the people building Claude — and increasingly, for Claude itself as an engineering collaborator.

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to own our development environment end to end. You'll make spinning up a fresh environment fast, design the isolation boundary that keeps local experimentation safely separated from shared research and production infrastructure, and build the pre-push validation layer that catches problems before they ever reach CI. You'll also help shape how our repository and platform topology evolves as the company scales, partnering closely with the infrastructure teams who own the substrate you build on.

This team works the way it expects the rest of the company to work: with Claude in the loop. Agentic coding is both how we operate day to day and a core part of what these environments need to support, so we're looking for someone who already builds this way and has informed opinions about where the leverage actually is.

Key responsibilities

• Own the local and hosted development environment end to end — container lifecycle, dependency provisioning, hot reload, and the single command an engineer runs to start working
• Drive down cold-start time for fresh development environments and keep it low as the codebase grows
• Design and implement the environment isolation model (sandboxes, ephemerally environments, namespace separation) that lets engineers experiment freely without risk to shared systems
• Build and maintain the pre-push validation surface so failures are caught on the engineer's machine, not in CI
• Partner with platform, delivery infrastructure, and tooling teams to shape the repository and service topology that best supports a fast inner loop
• Act as a technical lead across team boundaries — gathering requirements, building consensus, and advocating for the approach that's right for engineers across the company

Minimum qualifications

• Significant professional software engineering experience in backend or developer infrastructure domains
• Proficiency in Python
• Hands‑on experience with containers (Docker or equivalent), Kubernetes, and pod‑level operations
• Prior ownership of a developer environment, build system, or paved‑path workflow used by a multi‑team engineering organization, with demonstrable adoption
• Experience working across team boundaries to deliver infrastructure that other engineers depend on
• Daily, hands‑on use of AI coding assistants as part of your own development workflow

Preferred qualifications

• 7+ years of backend or developer infrastructure engineering experience
• Experience with Rust or Go
• A track record of reducing cold‑start or boot time on a complex multi‑service stack to under a minute, with before/after measurements
• Prior design of environment isolation models such as ephemerally environments, sandboxes, or isolated namespaces
• Experience leading (or making the case against) a monorepo extraction, repo split, or comparable scope‑boundary migration from the developer‑tooling side
• Familiarity with Bazel, Buck, Nix, or similar hermetic build systems
• Experience operating as a platform tech lead — broad context across the stack and a history of cross‑team influence

Representative projects

• Rebuilding the dev container image pipeline so a new engineer goes from git clone to a running environment in under 60 seconds
• Designing an ephemerally environment system that gives every branch its own isolated copy of downstream services
• Shipping a pre‑push hook framework that runs the relevant subset of tests and lints locally, cutting CI failure rate for first‑attempt pushes
• Instrumenting the inner loop to produce a live dashboard of p50/p95 edit‑build‑test latency across the engineering org
• Authoring the design doc and migration plan for how development environments should evolve alongside a major repository restructure

Annual compensation

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 sponsor visas, but not all roles can be supported. 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.