Staff+ Software Engineer, Product Sandboxing

United States Digital Space LLC; San Francisco (CA, WA); On-site; USD 405,000 - 485,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity donation matching

Generous vacation

Parental leave

Flexible working hours

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is hiring a senior backend/platform engineer to design, build, and operate scalable distributed systems powering our secure execution environment. You will own end-to-end delivery from design through deployment and operations, collaborating with research and product teams to scale our offerings for millions of users.

Ideal candidates have 8+ years in backend/platform roles, strong system design fundamentals, and fluency in Python/Go/Rust, with Kubernetes and

Qualifications

• Minimum of 8 years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer building scalable distributed systems.
• Strong fundamentals in service-oriented architectures, networking, and systems design.
• Proficient in Python, Go, Rust, or similar systems languages.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and/or multi-cloud networking.
• Take full ownership of work from design through deployment and operations.
• Navigate ambiguity and operate in 0 to 1 or more mature team settings.
• Product-focused approach to platform work and building robust, scalable solutions.

Responsibilities

• Independently scope complex, multi-month projects.
• Drive cross-org alignment through ambiguous problem spaces.
• Make architectural decisions shaping how the company builds and scales products.
• Partner with research to productize cutting-edge capabilities.
• Impact the platform used by hundreds of thousands of users and engineers.

Skills

8+ years backend/platform engineering

architecture & system design

Python

Go

Rust

cloud infrastructure

Kubernetes

multi-cloud networking

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

About the company

the company'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 build and run the secure execution environment behind Claude's agentic capabilities. When Claude writes and runs code, browses the web, or uses a computer, that happens on infrastructure our team owns. We work at the intersection of systems engineering and security. The goal is to make untrusted code execution safe, fast, and reliable enough that product teams don't have to think about it. This is the layer between the model and the outside world, and it has to hold up at scale for every the company product. We're hiring engineers who have experience building for containerized workloads and have a keen eye for building products used by millions of customers.

What you'll do

You'll independently scope complex, multi-month projects, drive cross-org alignment through ambiguous problem spaces, and make architectural decisions that shape how the company 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:

• Have a minimum of 8 years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer building scalable distributed systems, ideally operating at tech lead level or equivalent distributed systems, cloud-native products, developer tools, or external developer facing products

• Have strong fundamentals in service-oriented architectures, networking, and systems design, ideally having owned both the technical vision and execution of a foundational platform system end to end

• Are proficient in Python, Go, Rust, or similar systems languages

• Have experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and/or multi-cloud networking

• Take full ownership of your work—from design through deployment and operations

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

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

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.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At the company 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 the company, 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!

the company 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 aboutour policy for using AI in our application process.