Senior Staff Software Engineer, API
Remote-Friendly (Travel-Required) | San Francisco, CA | New York City, NYFull-TimeStaffSoftware Engineering
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 seeking an exceptional Senior Staff Software Engineer to join the Claude Developer Platform team and serve as the senior-most individual contributor across API Engineering. Since launch, the Claude API has seen rapid growth and adoption by companies of all sizes to build AI applications with our industry-leading models. The API serves as the primary channel for safely and broadly distributing AI's benefits across all sectors of the economy.
- This role sets the technical direction for the systems that make Claude accessible to developers, enterprises, and partners at scale. You will operate at the intersection of technical strategy and execution, partnering closely with Research, Inference, Platform, Infrastructure, and Safeguards to ensure the Claude API is reliable, capable, and positioned to grow with Anthropic's ambitions.
Responsibilities
- Define and drive multi-year technical strategy for the Claude API, setting direction across API Core, Capabilities, Knowledge, Distributability, and Agents.
- Identify and personally lead the highest-complexity, highest-impact engineering initiatives spanning multiple teams.
- Serve as the primary technical decision-maker for major architectural decisions with org-wide scope.
- Partner with Research to evaluate and integrate frontier capabilities; work with Inference and Platform for reliable delivery at scale; collaborate with Infrastructure and Safeguards for reliability, security, and responsible deployment.
- Mentor and develop Staff-level engineers across the org.
- Drive alignment across Product, GTM, Safety, and beyond while proactively identifying and addressing systemic technical risks.
- Define and drive multi-year technical strategy for the Claude API, setting direction across API Core, Capabilities, Knowledge, Distributability, and Agents.
- Identify and personally lead the highest-complexity, highest-impact engineering initiatives spanning multiple teams.
- Serve as the primary technical decision-maker for major architectural decisions with org-wide scope.
- Partner with Research to evaluate and integrate frontier capabilities; work with Inference and Platform for reliable delivery at scale; collaborate with Infrastructure and Safeguards for reliability, security, and responsible deployment.
- Mentor and develop Staff-level engineers across the org.
- Drive alignment across Product, GTM, Safety, and beyond while proactively identifying and addressing systemic technical risks.
You may be a good fit if you
- Have 12+ years of engineering experience with a clear track record operating at Staff or Senior Staff level.
- Have demonstrably shaped technical strategy for large-scale API or distributed systems platforms.
- Drive the highest-leverage technical outcomes without formal authority—you lead through influence, quality of thinking, and trust.
- Have deep expertise in distributed systems and API architecture, and are effective writing design docs, making architectural calls, and coding in critical paths.
- Are highly effective across org boundaries—you build trust with Research, Inference, Infrastructure, Safeguards, and business stakeholders alike.
- Bring strong product instincts and a craftsperson's approach to API design; you communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Have 12+ years of engineering experience with a clear track record operating at Staff or Senior Staff level.
- Have demonstrably shaped technical strategy for large-scale API or distributed systems platforms.
- Drive the highest-leverage technical outcomes without formal authority—you lead through influence, quality of thinking, and trust.
- Have deep expertise in distributed systems and API architecture, and are effective writing design docs, making architectural calls, and coding in critical paths.
- Are highly effective across org boundaries—you build trust with Research, Inference, Infrastructure, Safeguards, and business stakeholders alike.
- Bring strong product instincts and a craftsperson's approach to API design; you communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical audiences.
Technical Stack
- Languages: Python, TypeScript
- Frameworks: FastAPI, React
- Infrastructure: GCP, Kubernetes, Cloud Run, AWS, Azure
- Databases: PostgreSQL (AlloyDB), Vector Stores, Firestore
- Tools: Feature Flagging, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog
Tools: Feature Flagging, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog
- Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
- Location Preference: Preference will be given to candidates based in New York or the San Francisco Bay Area as these positions are part of an SF- or NY-based team.
- 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.
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.
