Staff Software Engineer - Distributed Storage Architect

EngineersOfAI; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic in San Francisco, CA is seeking an experienced Storage Architect/Engineer to lead the design and operation of our exabyte-scale storage platform. You will own architectural decisions, ensure security, reliability, and cost efficiency across regions and clouds.

You will partner with research, product, and infrastructure teams to deliver scalable, high-performance storage that supports Claude workloads and data pipelines.

Qualifications

• Experience designing, building, and operating a large-scale distributed storage system in production.
• Deep understanding of storage fundamentals: replication and erasure coding, consistency models, metadata management, durability, failure handling, high availability, access controls, identity models.
• Experience serving as owner, tech lead, or architect for a large, complex infrastructure system.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and hands-on coding ability in at least one systems language (C++, Rust, Go, or Java).
• Experience operating and steering critical infrastructure at scale.

Responsibilities

• Shape the technical strategy and architecture for Anthropic's storage layers.
• Build strong relationships with users and partner teams, and deep understanding of their access patterns and requirements: everything from large-scale ML and training workloads, to financial data processing with strong controls.
• Partner closely with CSPs, networking, and datacenter teams on infrastructure primitives.
• Translate user needs into scalable, achievable system designs and drive alignment.
• Make principled tradeoffs across durability, availability, consistency, performance, security, and cost, and document the reasoning so other engineers and teams can build on it.
• Break large problems into deliverable milestones, and lead cross-functional teams to ship new capabilities safely at unprecedented speed.
• Work across backend stacks, abstraction layers, and clients to provide users with simple, consistent interfaces no matter where data lives.
• Plan and lead large migrations of critical workloads with user minimal disruption.
• Participate in and improve operations, including SLOs, observability, capacity planning, incident response, and on-call.
• Stay hands-on in code and production, including in the most critical and complex areas.

Skills

Distributed storage systems

Storage architecture

C++

Rust

Go

Java

Security and access controls

Multi-region deployment

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

Storage plays an essential role at Anthropic across research, development, product, and running the business. Our exabyte-scale, multi-cloud storage infrastructure underpins training, CI, sandboxing, inference, warehousing, and long-term data retention. Our storage needs are growing rapidly with Claude. To keep up, we're looking for engineers who have designed, secured, operated, scaled, governed, and optimized blob storage platforms at hyper-scale.

You'll join a welcoming, collaborative, high-trust, high-velocity team that is devoted to our users and Anthropic's mission. You'll bring deep experience, essential technical guidance, user-centric product sense, and hands-on significant contributions to help us evolve Anthropic's storage capabilities while absorbing increasing volume and complexity. You'll own high-stakes architectural decisions and deliverables to make stored data securely and speedily accessible across varying infrastructures and regions. You'll collaborate closely with other orgs to drive world-class security, usability, reliability, and capacity/cost efficiency: both for the data we store, and the ways we make it accessible to power a wide range of workflows.

You'll partner with research, training, infrastructure, business, and data teams to understand our storage needs and opportunities, today and in the future. You'll drive strategic investments that uplevel Anthropic's ability to ship safe, useful AI at speed.

Key Responsibilities

• Shape the technical strategy and architecture for Anthropic's storage layers

• Build strong relationships with our users and partner teams, and deep understanding of their access patterns and unique security, usability, and business requirements: everything from large-scale ML and training workloads, to financial data processing with strong controls

• Partner closely with CSPs, networking, and datacenter teams on infrastructure primitives

• Translate user needs into scalable, achievable system designs and drive alignment

• Make principled tradeoffs across durability, availability, consistency, performance, security, and cost, and document the reasoning so other engineers and teams can build on it

• Break large problems into deliverable milestones, and lead cross-functional teams to ship new capabilities safely at unprecedented speed

• Work across backend stacks, abstraction layers, and clients to provide users with simple, consistent interfaces no matter where data lives

• Plan and lead large migrations of critical workloads with user minimal disruption

• Participate in and improve operations, including SLOs, observability, capacity planning, incident response, and on-call

• Stay hands-on in code and production, including in the most critical and complex areas

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience designing, building, and operating a large-scale distributed storage system in production, such as an object store, distributed file system, or block storage service.

• Deep understanding of storage system fundamentals, including: Replication and erasure coding, consistency models, metadata management, durability, failure handling, high availability, access controls, identity models, security approaches, abstraction layers, network requirements, multi-region considerations

• Experience serving as an owner, tech lead, or architect for a large, complex infrastructure system that orgs and customers depend on

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and hands-on coding ability in at least one systems language, such as C++, Rust, Go, or Java

• Experience operating and steering critical infrastructure at scale, inclu