Staff+ Software Engineer, Platform

Anthropic; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 405,000 - 485,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation and benefits

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Office space for collaboration

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking experienced software engineers for its Seattle office to enhance platform infrastructure for AI development. The role requires a minimum of 8 years’ experience with distributed systems and a strong foundation in service-oriented architectures. Expected responsibilities include architecting development environments, maintaining infrastructure for reliability, and working across multiple cloud providers. The annual salary ranges from $405,000 to $485,000 USD, alongside competitive benefits including flexible hours and generous leave policies.

Qualifications

• Minimum 8 years of experience in backend or platform engineering.
• Experience with cloud-native products and developer tools.
• Strong fundamentals in service-oriented architectures and systems design.
• Proficiency in languages like Python, Go, or Rust.
• Experience with multi-cloud networking and Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Architect and optimize development infrastructure for AI product development.
• Maintain core infrastructure enabling reliable services.
• Build infrastructure to operate across multiple cloud providers.
• Manage identity and authentication systems for the product suite.
• Own the transformation of Claude API for cloud-native environments.

Skills

Backend or platform engineering

Distributed systems

Service-oriented architecture

Python

Cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, Azure)

Kubernetes

Technical decision-making

Building scalable solutions

Job description

About The Role

We are looking for experienced software engineers to join our Platform organization. We build the foundational primitives that accelerate product development across Anthropic, and own infrastructure and systems that teams depend on to ship reliably and at scale—either internally or by hundreds of thousands of external global users and companies at all stages.

You’ll independently scope complex, multi‑month projects, drive cross‑org alignment through ambiguous problem spaces, and make architectural decisions that shape how Anthropic builds and scales its products. You’ll partner directly with research to productize cutting‑edge capabilities, and will have lasting impact on the platform that hundreds of thousands of companies and internal/external engineers depend on every day.

We have multiple teams that are currently hiring. Team placement occurs after the interview process, taking into account your interests and experience alongside organizational needs. This flexible approach allows us to match talented engineers with the backend product efforts where they’ll have the greatest impact and growth potential.

What You’ll Do

• Platform Acceleration: Architect and optimize the critical development infrastructure that powers our AI product development—including dev environments, observability, and CI/CD pipelines. Partner closely with product teams to understand their development workflow and eliminate friction points.
• Service Infra: Build and maintain the core infrastructure that powers Anthropic’s engineering organization—from service mesh and observability systems to deployment pipelines and shared libraries—enabling product teams to build and operate reliable services at scale.
• Multicloud: Build and maintain infrastructure that enables Anthropic to operate across multiple cloud providers, focusing on cloud‑agnostic tooling, cross‑cloud networking, and multi‑region deployments.
• Auth & Identity: Build and maintain the critical infrastructure that powers identity and authentication across Anthropic’s product suite, including user authentication, authorization, role‑based access control, and single sign‑on.
• Connectivity: Own the MCP proxy that routes every tool call and the OAuth and token management that keeps connections authenticated; work on reliability and enterprise trust, including token refresh at scale and proxy infrastructure for partner servers.
• API Distributability: Own the transformation that makes the Claude API a cloud‑native, managed product that runs wherever customers need it, with enterprise‑grade security, compliance, and operational capabilities.
• Platform Intelligence: Build training systems that adapt Claude to specific customer workloads; work with research on training methods and with agent platform teams on data paths, with experience in ML training infra and backend engineering.

Qualifications / You Might Be a Good Fit

• Minimum 8 years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer building scalable distributed systems, ideally at a tech lead level or equivalent.
• Experience with distributed systems, cloud‑native products, developer tools, or external developer‑facing products.
• Strong fundamentals in service‑oriented architectures, networking, and systems design, with ownership of technical vision and execution end‑to‑end.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, Rust, or similar systems languages.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and/or multi‑cloud networking.
• Full ownership mindset—from design through deployment and operations.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and make sound independent technical decisions; experience in 0‑to‑1 and more mature team or company settings.
• Product‑focused approach to platform work, caring about building robust, scalable, easy‑to‑use solutions.
• Enthusiasm for building systems that other engineers love to use.

Location & Compensation

We prefer candidates based in NY, SEA, SF, or the Bay Area. Location‑based hybrid policy: we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time, though some roles may require more time in office.

Annual salary range: $405,000—$485,000 USD.

Benefits

Anthropic offers competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space to collaborate with colleagues.

We sponsor visas; if we make an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to secure a visa for you.

Equal Opportunity

We encourage applicants from all backgrounds to apply. We are an equal‑opportunity employer and welcome diverse perspectives.