Staff+ Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Anthropic; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 485,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking software engineers to help build safety and oversight mechanisms for our AI systems. As a software engineer on the Safeguards team, you will monitor models, prevent misuse, and ensure user well‑being, focusing on distributed, scalable infrastructure to detect unwanted behaviors and enforce policy.

Responsibilities include leading multi‑month projects, deploying monitoring across clouds, designing sandboxed runtimes, and coordinating with security, privacy, and legal teams to

Qualifications

• Degree in CS or software engineering with strong software fundamentals.
• Proficiency in Python, distributed systems, and IaC.
• Experience across cloud providers or provider-agnostic designs.
• Experience with sandboxing or isolation tech; Rust is a plus.
• Strong communication to explain complex concepts.

Responsibilities

• Independently scope and lead complex, multi-month infrastructure projects from start to production.
• Develop monitoring systems to detect unwanted behaviors and surface results for review.
• Deploy monitoring across multiple clouds with consistent pipelines and observability.
• Design sandboxed runtimes with isolation, network controls, and audit logging.
• Manage cost and capacity for large-scale agent workloads and SLIs.
• Collaborate with engineers, researchers, security, privacy, and legal teams to ship trusted work.

Skills

Python

Distributed Systems

Infrastructure as Code

Cloud providers

Sandboxing

Rust

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering

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

We are looking for software engineers to help build safety and oversight mechanisms for our AI systems. As a software engineer on the Safeguards team, you will work to monitor models, prevent misuse, and ensure user well-being. This role will focus on building distributed and scalable systems to detect unwanted model behaviors and prevent disallowed use of models. You will apply your technical skills to uphold our principles of safety, transparency, and oversight while enforcing our terms of service and acceptable use policies.

Responsibilities

• Independently scope and lead complex, multi-month infrastructure projects, from an ambiguous starting point through to a production system
• Develop monitoring systems to detect unwanted behaviors from our API partners and potentially take automated enforcement actions; surface these in internal dashboards to analysts for manual review
• Stand up and run deployments of those monitoring systems across multiple clouds, including inside cloud-provider partner environments where data residency laws apply. Keep the deployments consistent through shared deployment pipelines, smoke tests, observability, and alerting
• Design and harden the sandboxed runtime that AI agents execute in: isolation, network egress controls, least-privilege data access, audit logging, and insider-risk controls
• Manage cost and capacity for large volumes of long-running agent work, and set and meet service-level objectives for the platform
• Partner with the engineers and researchers who write and evaluate the monitoring agents, and with security, privacy, and legal teams, so new detection work can ship quickly on a platform everyone trusts

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or comparable experience
• Proficiency in Python, Distributed Systems, and Infrastructure as Code
• Have worked across multiple cloud providers, or built infrastructure designed to be provider-agnostic
• Have built and operated large-scale, distributed infrastructure, such as data platforms, control planes, or job schedulers
• Have experience with sandboxing and isolation technologies (containers, microVMs, network policy) or with a systems language such as Rust
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders

Strong Candidates May Also

• 8+ years of experience in a software engineering position, not including internships
• Have built systems that handle sensitive or regulated data, with requirements around access control, auditability, retention, and data residency
• Have experience running LLM-based agents in production
• Have experience with integrity, spam, fraud, or abuse detection and mitigation

Deadline to Apply

None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

Annual Salary

$320,000—$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.

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.