Staff+ Software Engineer, Storage + Transfer

Anthropic Limited; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking an engineer to own and evolve storage infrastructure that underpins model training, inference, and data workflows across research, product, and operations. You will design, secure, and scale blob storage layers for multi‑cloud environments, ensuring durability, availability, and cost efficiency.

Collaborating with research, infrastructure, CSPs, and data teams, you’ll translate user needs into scalable system designs, set architectural direction, and lead cross‑functional

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 security.
• Experience as owner/tech lead/architect for large infrastructure systems that orgs depend on.
• Strong fundamentals in systems programming with C++, Rust, Go, or Java.
• Experience operating infrastructure at scale including security, on-call, incident response, and capacity planning.
• Strong written and verbal communication across multiple teams and stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Shape the technical strategy and architecture for Anthropic's storage layers.
• Build relationships with users and partner teams and understand access patterns and security/business requirements.
• Partner with CSPs, networking, and datacenter teams on infrastructure primitives.
• Translate user needs into scalable system designs and drive alignment.
• Make tradeoffs on durability, availability, cost, and performance and document the reasoning.
• Lead cross-functional teams to ship new capabilities safely at speed.
• Work across backend stacks to provide simple interfaces across data stores.
• Plan and lead large migrations with minimal disruption.
• Participate in and improve operations including SLOs, observability, and capacity planning.
• Stay hands-on in code and production in critical areas.

Skills

Distributed storage

Storage fundamentals

Owner/tech lead

Systems programming

Security and incident

Communication skills

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

Annual Compensation Range

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: $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