Staff+ Software Engineer, Observability

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

Anthropic is seeking talented and experienced Software Engineers to join our Observability team within the Infrastructure organization. The Observability team owns the monitoring and telemetry infrastructure that every engineer and researcher at Anthropic depends onfrom metrics and logging pipelines to distributed tracing error analytics alerting and the dashboards and query interfaces that make it all actionable. By joining this team youll have a direct impact on the reliability and operational excellence of Anthropics research and product systems.

As Anthropic scales its infrastructure across massive GPU TPU and Trainium clusters the volume and complexity of operational data is growing by orders of magnitude. Were building next-generation observability systemshigh-throughput ingest pipelines cost-efficient columnar storage unified query layers across signals and agentic diagnostic toolsto ensure that engineers can detect diagnose and resolve issues in minutes rather than hours even as the systems they operate become exponentially more complex.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable telemetry ingest and storage pipelines for metrics logs traces and error data across Anthropics multi-cluster infrastructure
• Own and evolve core observability platforms driving migrations and architectural improvements that improve reliability reduce cost and scale with organizational growth
• Build instrumentation libraries SDKs and integrations that make it easy for engineering teams to emit high-quality telemetry from their services
• Drive alerting and SLO infrastructure that enables teams to define monitor and respond to reliability targets with minimal noise
• Reduce mean time to detection and resolution by building cross-signal correlation unified query interfaces and AI-assisted diagnostic tooling
• Partner with Research Inference Product and Infrastructure teams to ensure observability solutions meet the unique needs of each organization

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Have 10 years of relevant industry experience building and operating large-scale observability or monitoring infrastructure
• Have deep experience with at least one observability signal area (metrics logging tracing or error analytics) and familiarity with the others
• Understand high-throughput data pipelines columnar storage engines and the tradeoffs involved in ingesting and querying telemetry data at scale
• Have experience operating or building on top of observability platforms such as Prometheus Grafana ClickHouse OpenTelemetry or similar systems
• Have strong proficiency in at least one of Python Rust or Go
• Have excellent communication skills and enjoy partnering with internal teams to improve their operational visibility and incident response capabilities
• Are excited about building foundational infrastructure and are comfortable working independently on ambiguous high-impact technical challenges

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Experience operating metrics systems at very high cardinality (hundreds of millions of active time series or more)
• Experience with log storage migrations or operating columnar databases (ClickHouse BigQuery or similar) for analytics workloads
• Experience with OpenTelemetry instrumentation collector pipelines and tail-based sampling strategies
• Experience building or operating alerting platforms on-call tooling or SLO frameworks at scale
• Experience with Kubernetes-native monitoring eBPF-based observability or continuous profiling
• Interest in applying AI/LLMs to operational workflows such as automated root cause analysis anomaly detection or intelligent alerting

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.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you 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 youre ever unsure about a communication dont click any linksvisit for confirmed position openings.

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