Staff Software Engineer — RL Environment Platform

Anthropic; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 405,000 - 605,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a senior software engineer to design APIs and frameworks that researchers and engineers rely on to build robust RL environments. You will own platform layers, embed with research teams, and create production-grade tooling to debug and maintain environments.

The role emphasizes verification, stateful systems, and scalable collaboration across large codebases. The position is located in a hybrid setting under Anthropic's location policy, with expectations to work in offices at

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in Python, including static typing, safe async and concurrency patterns, and writing performant code.
• Strong taste in API and framework design, ability to explain why an interface is right or wrong and a track record of adoption of your frameworks.
• Experience designing or operating stateful concurrent or distributed systems, and reasoning about failure, idempotency, consistency.
• Habit of verification: measure before concluding, build checks that show a system is correct.
• Experience working in large, evolving, or research-style codebases you didn’t originally write.
• Strong written and verbal communication with collaborators of varied engineering backgrounds, and comfort with ambiguity.

Responsibilities

• Design widely used APIs, frameworks, and abstractions that other engineers and researchers build on, making correct usage the default.
• Own the platform layers that sit beneath every environment, including the agent runtime.
• Build tooling that lets environment owners understand, debug, and maintain their environments in production without needing an infrastructure engineer.
• Embed with research teams on a rotational basis, work directly in their codebases without slowing down the research they support, and transfer ownership when you rotate off.
• Anticipate silent failure modes and prevent them structurally through type safety, invariants, testing, and refactors.
• Drive adoption of new frameworks across the organization, including deprecations and cutovers.
• Help define engineering standards, review practices, and design patterns for a new team, mentoring researchers and engineers.

Skills

Python

API design

Distributed systems

Verification

Big codebases

Communication

Tools

None

Job description

Anthropic is seeking a senior software engineer to design APIs and frameworks that researchers and engineers rely on to build robust RL environments. You will own platform layers, embed with research teams, and create production-grade tooling to debug and maintain environments.

The role emphasizes verification, stateful systems, and scalable collaboration across large codebases. The position is located in a hybrid setting under Anthropic's location policy, with expectations to work in offices at