Software Engineer, Platform

About Anthropic

Anthropics 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

We are looking for backend / platform software engineers to join our Product Foundations org. We build foundational primitives that help accelerate product development across Anthropic. Some examples of what we own and maintain are our core sampling pipeline our rate limiting platform and our RAG platform.

We have multiple teams that are currently hiring. Team placement occurs after the interview process taking into account your interests and experience alongside organizational needs. This flexible approach allows us to match talented engineers with the platform efforts where theyll have the greatest impact and growth potential:

Billing Platform: We build and operate the billing infrastructure that powers all of Anthropics products - enabling revenue collection across different pricing models subscriptions and multi-entity operations for global compliance. Youll work on distributed systems that need to be both fast and correct: real-time tracking revenue reconciliation across payment providers and ledger systems that ensure accuracy at scale. This is production-critical infrastructure where data consistency matters and youll collaborate closely with finance product and accounting teams to build the foundation that scales our business. If youve built billing platforms or payment systems that will be a big plus.

Product Platform: We provide a set of stable powerful and easy to use shared product capabilities leveraged by the API and other internal product and research teams. Youll work on our core platform components like rate limiting LLM sampling and multimodal processing. Our mandate includes developing reusable components improving system performance and creating scalable abstractions that accelerate product development across the organization while maintaining high standards for reliability and security.

Accounts Platform: We build and maintain the critical infrastructure that powers identity and authentication across Anthropics product suite. We work closely with product teams security support and trust & safety as customers. We create scalable solutions for user authentication authorization role-based access control and single sign-on that form the backbone of our companys identity management operations. We maintain a user-centric approach building reliable systems that our users and company can depend on as we tackle complex challenges at the intersection of security scalability and user experience.

Product Dev Prod

We work on maximizing the developer productivity of product engineers at Anthropic. Youll architect and optimize the critical development infrastructure that powers our AI product development including dev environments developer tooling and CI/CD pipelines. Youll partner closely with product teams to understand their development workflow and eliminate friction points. Your work will have an extraordinary multiplier effect enhancing productivity across our entire product organization and accelerating our mission.

Responsibilities:

• Build and scale platform components to handle Anthropics rapid growth
• Design and architect platform components that are composable and deliver value for a variety of use cases
• Collaborate closely with product teams to understand their needs and build platform capabilities that accelerate their feature delivery
• Make build vs buy decisions evaluating and implementing 3rd party solutions when most impactful
• Set technical direction and vision for various product and platform features
• Partner with research to quickly prototype and launch new capabilities based on research breakthroughs

You might be a good fit if you:

• Have 6 years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer building scalable distributed systems
• Have strong coding skills and experience with service-oriented architectures
• Have worked in early start-up or otherwise fast moving rapidly evolving environments and have ideally built products from 0 to 1
• Take full ownership of your work navigate ambiguity effectively and proactively overcome obstacles to deliver results
• Are comfortable diving into any part of the system whether its infrastructure services or product frontends to deliver effective solutions
• Enjoy working with a fast-paced team tackling cutting-edge problems in AI safety and conversational AI
• Take a product-focused approach and care about building solutions that are robust scalable and easy to use
• Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
• Have a Bachelors degree in Computer Science Software Engineering or comparable experience

Strong candidates may also:

• Have worked with NLP and ML models and understand their capabilities and limitations
• Have experience with REST APIs
• Have experience with React and Frontend frameworks

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelors degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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 arent 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 youre interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones were 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.

How were 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. Were 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 aboutour policyfor using AI in our application process