Staff+ Software Engineer, Platform Connectivity

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 405,000 - 485,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic Limited is seeking experienced software engineers to join the Connectivity team in San Francisco. You will design, build, and operate the core connectivity infrastructure behind external tool calls, including the MCP proxy and OAuth/token management, ensuring reliable connections for partners and internal teams.

You’ll own reliability, implement admin controls and permission models for enterprise IT, and contribute to the MCP standard and its ecosystem, including Python and TypeScript

Qualifications

• Backend or platform engineer with production systems experience.
• Experience using AI tools within software development processes.
• Ability to own end‑to‑end work from design through deployment and ops.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate core connectivity infrastructure (MCP proxy, OAuth, token management).
• Own reliability including SLOs, on‑call, incident response, and postmortems.
• Contribute to MCP standards and SDKs, and drive cross‑org alignment on architecture.

Skills

Backend platform engineering

AI tools in development

Product‑driven platform work

Ownership from design to ops

Distributed systems reliability

Cross‑team communication

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

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

Our mission on the Connectivity team is to make Claude the most connected AI. As agents take on more real-world work, we're taking a leading role in defining how they get access to external systems — safely, with the right permissions, and in ways enterprises can trust. We ship standards and services used by claude.ai, Claude Code, Cowork, and the API. We own the MCP proxy that routes every tool call and the OAuth and token management that keeps connections authenticated. We're also core contributors to the MCP spec — now an open standard under the Linux Foundation — and maintain the official Python and TypeScript SDKs. We're looking for experienced software engineers to join Connectivity. The team spans San Francisco and London, and you'll work closely with partner teams across Anthropic to deliver impact across all of our products. You'll work on problems where reliability and enterprise trust are critical. This means OAuth at scale, admin controls that let IT govern what agents can do, and proxy infrastructure that is reliable by default.

What you'll do

You'll design, build, and operate the core connectivity infrastructure behind external tool calls — the MCP proxy and the OAuth and token management systems that keep connections authenticated. You'll own reliability for infrastructure that other teams and external partners depend on, including SLOs, on-call, incident response, and postmortems. You'll build the admin controls and permission models that let enterprise IT govern what agents can do, and contribute to the MCP standard and its ecosystem, including the spec and the official Python and TypeScript SDKs. You'll turn ambiguous outcomes into shipped, scoped work, dogfooding what you build in the products that consume it. 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.

You might be a good fit if you

• Experience as a backend or platform engineer


• Familiarity with using AI tools as part of the software development process


• Take a product-focused approach to platform work and care about building solutions that are robust, scalable, and easy to use


• Take full ownership of your work — from design through build, deployment, and operations, to iterating on and improving your product


• Can navigate ambiguity and make sound technical decisions independently, and have ideally operated in both 0 → 1 and more mature team or company settings


• Experience operating production distributed systems, with an understanding of what reliability, observability, and incident response require at scale


• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to build consensus across teams and time zones

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 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.