Staff+ Software Engineer, Claude App Infrastructure
Anthropic is hiring a Staff+ Software Engineer, Claude App Infrastructure in San Francisco, New York and Seattle, United States. It pays $320k-$485k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Anthropic.
Level's read on this job
- On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- The listed pay starts 90% above the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- Anthropic mentions visa sponsorship in this posting.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include AI safety and AI research.
- Level lists 680 other open roles at Anthropic.
AI in this role
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
Claude App Infrastructure owns the reliability, experience, and agentic capabilities of claude.ai. We're the platform team for Anthropic's flagship consumer product, responsible for the serving architecture that keeps Claude available at scale, the conversation experience, and the infrastructure that lets every product team at Anthropic ship into claude.ai safely and fast. When the product grows at hyper scale, we're the team that makes sure it feels the same or better.
Beyond the foundation, we're building the agentic layer that turns claude.ai from a chat surface into an execution surface: task execution, personalization, browser use, and server-side tools. This is where the next generation of the product gets built: the primitives that let Claude act in the world, not just respond. We believe reliability and velocity are the same problem, and our job is to build the systems that make both inevitable.
Key responsibilities
- Design and build sandboxed compute environments where Claude can safely execute code, access tools, and interact with external services
- Build state management systems for long-running agent tasks, handling checkpoints, recovery, and resumption across failures
- Develop authentication and authorization frameworks for delegated access, so Claude can act on behalf of users securely
- Create observability and debugging tools for agent execution, so we understand what Claude did, why, and how to make it better
- Partner closely with product and research teams to define what's possible and ship it
Minimum qualifications
- Experience building distributed systems, infrastructure, or platform services at scale
- Comfort building cloud native infrastructure on GCP, AWS, or Azure
- Experience with containers, sandboxing, or secure execution environments (e.g., gVisor, Firecracker, V8 isolates)
- Write clean, maintainable code in Python, Go, Rust, or a similar language
- Care about security, isolation, and building systems that fail safely
Preferred qualifications
- Comfort with ambiguity and greenfield work where you help shape the architecture
- Interest in problems that don't have existing playbooks
- Experience building multi-tenant execution platforms or serverless infrastructure
- Background in security engineering, sandboxing, or isolation technologies
- Familiarity with workflow orchestration systems (Temporal, Airflow, Step Functions)
- Experience with state machines, checkpointing, or durable execution patterns
- Low-level systems experience (Linux internals, eBPF, container runtimes)
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:$320,000—$485,000 USDLogistics
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.
We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. 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.
Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.
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.
The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. 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.
Come work with us!
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.
How we rate this
Staff+ Software Engineer, Claude App Infrastructure at Anthropic rates 83 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $320k
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting starts 90% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you think about the risk of an AI system in this kind of role failing silently?
- Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
- How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
- Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI Safety and AI Research. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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