Staff+ Software Engineer, Public Sector
Anthropic is hiring a Staff+ Software Engineer, Public Sector in San Francisco, New York and Washington DC, 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 Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- Pay on this posting starts 141% higher than the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- Some of the work can be done remotely, according to the posting.
- The posting mentions visa sponsorship.
- The posting mentions AI safety, AI research and full stack among its tools and skills.
AI in this role
Staff software engineer to architect and deploy Claude AI applications for U.S. government and public sector workflows.
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
Anthropic is bringing Claude to the U.S. government and allied democracies, and we’re looking for startup-minded engineers to grow our public sector engineering team. This is a small team with large surface area. You’ll work across the stack to take products from 0 to 1 and beyond.
We are looking for product- and civic-minded engineers with a track record of building and scaling great products. The opportunities outpace our ability to build them all, so the right candidate thrives on sharp judgment, prioritization, and focus. You’ll own work like:
- Building Claude products that can be used by customers in highly regulated environments
- Deploying Claude into government networks
- Understanding and improving Claude’s usefulness in common government workflows – for example, policy research, benefits administration, intelligence analysis
- Scaling and innovating Claude for Government, our existing product serving U.S. government customers today
Our team is filling a number of roles and is open to candidates with either full-stack or backend experience.
Key responsibilities
- Architect and ship deployments that meet public sector compliance and security requirements, from FedRAMP to classified networks
- Build AI applications tailored to government workflows by developing deep understanding of how agencies actually operate
- Partner with research and safeguards teams to evaluate and improve Claude for government use cases
- Work directly with government customers and internal go-to-market teams to turn requirements into technical and product roadmaps
- Design scalable systems for deployment, user management, and administrative controls across constrained environments
- Create clarity and technical direction in a fast-moving environment with unique constraints
Minimum qualifications
- Experience building AI products and a working intuition for their capabilities and limitations
- A strong technical track record building and shipping enterprise- or government-grade products
- Excellent cross-functional collaboration skills — you’ll partner with sales, legal, research, and policy teams alike
Preferred qualifications
- Have 8+ years of experience as a full stack or backend software engineer
- Startup experience, particularly in scaling products from zero to one
- Experience partnering with sales, customer success, and professional services teams to drive product adoption
- Experience deploying software on government networks
- Active federal security clearance (Secret or above)
This position requires verification of U.S. citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports a United States federal, state, and/or local government agency customer and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law. To meet this legal requirement, citizenship will be verified via a valid passport, or other approved documents, or verified US government clearance.
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, Public Sector at Anthropic rates 75 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● 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 full stack was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where backend was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where system architecture was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI Safety, AI Research, Full Stack, Backend, and System Architecture. 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.
- Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.
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