Staff+ Software Engineer, Storage + Transfer

Anthropic; New York (NY); On-site; USD 320,000 - 405,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking an engineer to shape the storage architecture powering research, training, and production workloads. You will design, secure, and operate exabyte-scale storage systems across multi-cloud environments, balancing performance, reliability, and cost.

You will partner with research, infrastructure, and data teams to drive strategic investments and deliver high-impact capabilities at unprecedented speed while maintaining security and governance across regions.

Qualifications

• Experience designing, building, and operating a large-scale distributed storage system in production.
• Deep understanding of storage fundamentals including replication, erasure coding, consistency, durability, high availability, and access controls.
• Experience as owner, tech lead, or architect for a large infrastructure system that others depend on.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and hands-on coding in C++, Rust, Go, or Java.
• Experience operating and steering critical infrastructure at scale, including security, on-call, incident response, and capacity planning.
• Strong written and verbal communication across multiple orgs and stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Shape the technical strategy and architecture for Anthropic's storage layers.
• Build relationships with users and partner teams, understanding access patterns and security, usability, and business requirements.
• Partner with CSPs, networking, and datacenter teams on infrastructure primitives.
• Translate user needs into scalable system designs and drive alignment.
• Make principled tradeoffs across durability, availability, consistency, performance, security, and cost, with clear reasoning.

Skills

Distributed storage systems

System design

Languages: C++, Rust, Go, or Java

Ownership / tech lead experience

Security, on-call, and incident reply

Cross-functional communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree

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

Storage plays an essential role at Anthropic across research, development, product, and running the business. Our exabyte-scale, multi-cloud storage infrastructure underpins training, CI, sandboxing, inference, warehousing, and long-term data retention. Our storage needs are growing rapidly with Claude. To keep up, we're looking for engineers who have designed, secured, operated, scaled, governed, and optimized blob storage platforms at hyper-scale.

You’ll join a welcoming, collaborative, high-trust, high-velocity team that is devoted to our users and Anthropic's mission. You’ll bring deep experience, essential technical guidance, user-centric product sense, and hands‑on significant contributions to help us evolve Anthropic's storage capabilities while absorbing increasing volume and complexity. You’ll own high‑stakes architectural decisions and deliverables to make stored data securely and speedily accessible across varying infrastructures and regions. You’ll collaborate closely with other orgs to drive world‑class security, usability, reliability, and capacity/cost efficiency: both for the data we store, and the ways we make it accessible to power a wide range of workflows.

You’ll partner with research, training, infrastructure, business, and data teams to understand our storage needs and opportunities, today and in the future. You’ll drive strategic investments that uplevel Anthropic's ability to ship safe, useful AI at speed.

Key Responsibilities

• Shape the technical strategy and architecture for Anthropic's storage layers
• Build strong relationships with our users and partner teams, and deep understanding of their access patterns and unique security, usability, and business requirements: everything from large‑scale ML and training workloads, to financial data processing with strong controls
• Partner closely with CSPs, networking, and datacenter teams on infrastructure primitives
• Translate user needs into scalable, achievable system designs and drive alignment
• Make principled tradeoffs across durability, availability, consistency, performance, security, and cost, and document the reasoning so other engineers and teams can build on it
• Break large problems into deliverable milestones, and lead cross‑functional teams to ship new capabilities safely at unprecedented speed
• Work across backend stacks, abstraction layers, and clients to provide users with simple, consistent interfaces no matter where data lives
• Plan and lead large migrations of critical workloads with user minimal disruption
• Participate in and improve operations, including SLOs, observability, capacity planning, incident response, and on‑call
• Stay hands‑on in code and production, including in the most critical and complex areas

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience designing, building, and operating a large‑scale distributed storage system in production, such as an object store, distributed file system, or block storage service.
• Deep understanding of storage system fundamentals, including: Replication and erasure coding, consistency models, metadata management, durability, failure handling, high availability, access controls, identity models, security approaches, abstraction layers, network requirements, multi‑region considerations
• Experience serving as an owner, tech lead, or architect for a large, complex infrastructure system that orgs and customers depend on
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and hands‑on coding ability in at least one systems language, such as C++, Rust, Go, or Java
• Experience operating and steering critical infrastructure at scale, including security, on‑call, incident response, capacity planning, customer support, and cost efficiency
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience driving alignment on technical direction and user‑facing across multiple orgs and stakeholders

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

Annual Salary

$320,000—$405,000 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.

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 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.

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.

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.