Staff+ Software Engineer, Platform Safety

Anthropic

San Francisco (CA)

Hybrid

USD 405,000 - 485,000

Full time

4 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

optional equity donation matching

generous vacation and parental leave

flexible working hours

a lovely office space

Job summary

Anthropic seeks a Staff+ Backend/Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate scalable access systems for its most capable models. You’ll own identity and verification services (KYC/KYB), integrate vendors, protect data, and extend coverage across regions and products.

You'll shape architecture, mentor a growing team, and participate in on-call and incident response while driving new programs from idea to delivery. Preference for candidates in NY, SF, or Bay Area.

Qualifications

8+ years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer, ideally at tech lead level or equivalent.
Experience designing and operating production distributed systems on a critical path, with emphasis on correctness, latency and availability.
Ability to navigate ambiguity, set technical direction and mentor growing teams.

Responsibilities

Design, build and operate the systems that decide access to Anthropic's models; create scalable, reusable verification services (KYC/KYB).
Evolve core access services to be highly available and consistent across products and cloud platforms.
Shape architecture through proposals, review designs, and mentor engineers; participate in on-call and incident response; support new programs.

Skills

Backend engineering

Platform engineering

Systems design

KYC/KYB

Cloud platforms

Incident response

Mentoring engineers

Cross-functional collaboration

Data protection

Tools

AWS

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

Platform Safety builds the infrastructure that lets Anthropic bring its most capable models to more people, safely and securely. Our systems decide both who can access our most advanced models, and what capabilities they can access, wherever Claude is available. That includes identity and business verification, trusted access programs, and the core services that grant, hold and enforce model access across our products. These systems already power the Cyber Verification Program, which now includes Project Glasswing, and the Life Sciences Verification Program with further more advanced use cases in development.

As a Staff+ engineer, you'll help set the technical direction for this work. The foundations are live and adoption is growing quickly, so the next challenge is scale: making access a matter of configuration instead of code, making verification reusable, and giving customers a consistent experience on every surface. You'll work closely with safeguards, product, design and research to turn safety policy into systems that are easy to use and enforce. You'll also take new 0 → 1 efforts from idea to delivery as new capabilities and programs emerge.

What you’ll do

You’ll design, build and operate the systems that decide who gets access to our most capable models. You’ll build the platform that lets teams across Anthropic launch and run trusted access programs, moving access rules out of code and into data so that launching a new model or complex program is simple and scalable. You’ll build out our identity and business verification system (KYC/KYB) as a reusable service that any program can use, which means integrating verification vendors, protecting sensitive personal data, expanding into new regions, and building fair review and appeal paths for customers. You’ll also evolve the core services behind every access decision, including the services that grant and hold access and the customer and user identity models they rely on, and keep them highly available and consistent across our own products and cloud platforms.

You’ll shape the architecture through clear written proposals, review key designs, and mentor engineers on a growing team. You’ll also share on-call, lead incident response, and support emerging new programs.

You Might Be a Good Fit If You

Have a minimum of 8 years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer, ideally at tech lead level or equivalent, and are comfortable working across the stack when the problem calls for it
Have strong product sense, and work closely with cross-functional partners, including non-engineers, to shape and execute strategy in new domains
Use AI tools as a regular part of how you design, build and review software
Have designed and operated production distributed systems on a critical path, where correctness, latency and availability all matter
Take full ownership of your work, from design through build, deployment, operations and iteration
Navigate ambiguity and make sound technical decisions independently, have set technical direction that other engineers and teams adopted, and have ideally operated in both 0 → 1 and more mature settings
Care about building robust, scalable systems that other engineers and businesses love to use
Care about the societal impacts of your work and Anthropic's mission to build safe, beneficial AI

Strong Candidates May Also Have

Identity, access control or authorization systems at scale
Fraud, risk, trust and safety, or KYC/KYB systems, including working with verification vendors
Regulated or compliance-sensitive environments, including handling sensitive personal data
Integrating with cloud platforms or partner ecosystems such as AWS, Google Cloud and Azure

Deadline to apply

None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

Location Preference

Preference will be given to candidates based in NY, SEA, SF or the Bay Area given the current location of team.

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

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.