Staff+ Software Engineer, Developer Acceleration
Anthropic is hiring a Staff+ Software Engineer, Developer Acceleration in San Francisco and Seattle, United States. It pays $405k-$485k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Anthropic.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this software engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- Pay on this posting starts 141% higher than the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- The posting mentions visa sponsorship.
- The posting mentions Python, Kubernetes and AI safety among its tools and skills.
- Anthropic has 677 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Design and build the agent runtime platform and developer acceleration infrastructure for AI agents at Anthropic.
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.
Staff+ Software Engineer, Developer Acceleration
About the Role
Anthropic is seeking talented and experienced Staff+ Software Engineers to join Developer Acceleration within the Developer Productivity organization. The Developer Acceleration team is responsible for the infrastructure that enables thousands of employees to be productive via agents. By joining this team, you'll have a direct impact on the velocity and quality of Anthropic's research and engineering development. You will be defining how AI transforms our work and building the future of agentic productivity.
Some things that the team owns:
- Agent Runtime Platform for provisioning and running agents
- Knowledge for providing relevant internal context to agents and humans
Some of our work is mentioned in When AI Builds itself and Building effective human-agent teams.
Responsibilities
- Define the future of agentic productivity at scale and at the frontier
- Own the technical strategy and roadmap for your area, translating goals into concrete execution
- Define what quality means for agent-driven engineering work, and hold that line across the company
- Stay hands-on: build and ship the runtime platform and tooling
- Build agent harnesses and experiment with various context management strategies to improve agent performance and correctness
- Write evals to benchmark agent behaviors
- Deliver impact by collaborating cross-team
- Own infrastructure scalability and reliability, and establish operational excellence practices
You May Be a Good Fit If You:
- Have 10+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems
- Have 3+ years of experience leading large scale, complex projects or teams as an engineer or tech lead
- Have a lot of experience with agents, eg. agents doing technical/knowledge work
- Are obsessed with productivity and transforming how we work
- Have experience building scalable platforms
- Have excellent communication skills and enjoy supporting internal partners
Strong Candidates May Also Have:
- Deep understanding of, and care for, how human work will evolve; and a drive to help shepherd that transition
- Experience with container or VM orchestration at scale
- Experience working with researchers and engineers
- Developer productivity or infrastructure experience, such as CI/CD, builds, etc.
- Experience building widely adopted CLI tools and services
Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
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:$405,000—$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, Developer Acceleration at Anthropic rates 90 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
Pay
- This job starts at
- $405k
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting starts 141% 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?
- Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where platform engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where agentic workflows was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI Safety, AI Research, Distributed Systems, Platform Engineering, and Agentic Workflows. 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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