Staff+ Software Engineer, Storage + Transfer

Alex Loftus; Northern, New York (KY, NY); Hybrid; USD 260,000 - 340,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a Staff+ Software Engineer, Storage + Transfer, to shape and operate large-scale storage systems across multiple regions. You will own architectural decisions and collaborate with research, infrastructure, product, and business teams to improve security, usability, reliability, and capacity/cost efficiency.

You’ll lead hands-on delivery, drive strategic investments, and ensure fast, secure access to data for diverse workflows across environments.

Qualifications

• Experience designing, building, and operating a large-scale distributed storage system in production.
• Deep understanding of replication, erasure coding, durability, multi-region storage.
• Experience as owner/tech lead/architect for large infrastructure relied on by others.
• Strong software fundamentals with hands-on coding in a systems language (C++, Rust, Go, or Java).
• Experience operating infrastructure at scale: security, on-call, capacity planning, and cost efficiency.
• Excellent written and verbal communication for alignment across multiple orgs.

Responsibilities

• Shape the technical strategy and architecture for Anthropic's storage layers.
• Build strong relationships with users and partner teams; understand 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.
• Balance durability, availability, consistency, performance, security, and cost; document the reasoning.
• Lead cross-functional teams to ship new capabilities safely and quickly.
• Work across backend stacks to provide simple, consistent interfaces for data.
• Plan and lead large migrations with minimal user disruption.
• Participate in and improve operations: SLOs, observability, capacity planning, incident response, on-call.
• Stay hands-on in code and production, in the most critical areas.

Skills

Distributed storage

Systems programming

Technical leadership

C++, Rust, Go, or Java

Security and reliability

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree

Job description

Staff+ Software Engineer, Storage + Transfer

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.

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.

$1 - $2 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