Staff+ Software Engineer, Backend

About the role

The role involves building and scaling the backend systems that power user experiences across Anthropic's API, Claude Code, and Claude.ai. You will independently scope complex, multi-month projects, lead peers through technical and product decisions, and drive alignment with product, peer engineering teams, and research to identify capability gaps and translate frontier model improvements into shipped products.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale the foundation of the Claude API—systems that deliver Claude's intelligence to developers.
• Own the performance, reliability, and efficiency of the core serving path, ensuring users get the most speed and value from our models.
• Partner closely with inference and safeguards to optimize the full stack.
• Bring frontier model capabilities to developers through the Claude API, owning core features like vision, tool use, and computer use.
• Work on making Claude a true knowledge worker by ensuring the model has access to and understands the right knowledge at the right time.
• Build products and tools to enable developers to harness the full power of LLMs to create successful, reliable, and groundbreaking applications.
• Focus on building infrastructure and APIs that enable developers to create powerful agentic applications within the Claude API.
• Build the technical scaffolding for a new offering, tackling the challenges at the intersection of commercial motions, platform architecture, and partner integrations.

Requirements

• 8+ years of relevant experience as a backend or product engineer.
• Strong coding fundamentals and ability to work across backend systems, APIs, and integrations.
• Experience leading the design and delivery of large-scale backend systems in production.
• Experience driving alignment across technical and non-technical teams.
• Experience with distributed systems, API design, and cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Ability to thrive in fast-paced environments and navigate ambiguity.

Qualifications

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.
• Field of study: Relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.

Skills

• Product mindset.
• Technical leadership.
• Collaboration and communication skills.
• Experience with AI and machine learning.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits.
• Optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Flexible working hours.
• Lovely office space.

Pay

$405,000—$485,000 USD

Schedule

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.

Location-based hybrid policy

We are a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco.