Software Engineer, Agent SDK Claude Code

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 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.

The Role

The Claude Agent SDK is the foundational layer that powers autonomous AI agents giving developers access to the same tools agent loop and context management that power Claude Code programmable in Python and TypeScript. Its what enables agents to read files run commands search the web edit code and more out of the box.

Were looking for a Software Engineer to own and lead the Agent SDK. This is a high-ownership high-autonomy role: youll set the technical direction for the SDK be opinionated about its API design and developer experience and be the connective tissue between internal teams building next-generation experiences (Claude Desktop Cowork IDE extensions) and external developers building production agents on top of Claude.

Youll need to exercise taste and judgment about what to build balancing a rich stream of requests from internal stakeholders and external customers against a clear product vision for what a great agentic SDK should be.

Responsibilities

• Own the roadmap and technical direction for the Claude Agent SDK (Python and TypeScript)
• Design clean intuitive APIs that make it easy to build powerful reliable agents
• Partner closely with internal teams building on Agent SDK including Claude Desktop Cowork and IDE extensions to understand their needs and prioritize accordingly
• Engage directly with external developers to understand how theyre using the SDK where theyre hitting friction and what unlocks the next generation of use cases
• Raise the quality bar on documentation examples and the overall developer experience
• Collaborate with other Claude Code engineers to expose new model capabilities through clean SDK abstractions

You may be a good fit if you

• Have strong opinions about what great developer tools look like grounded in experience building or using them
• Are energized by owning something end-to-end from API design through docs through developer adoption
• Have experience designing and shipping developer-facing SDKs or APIs and have felt the difference between an SDK that developers love and one they merely tolerate
• Are excited about the frontier of agentic AI agents that can reason plan and act autonomously
• Have hands-on experience with agentic patterns: tool use orchestration context management multi-step reasoning
• Can operate independently in ambiguous environments and push projects forward without waiting for direction
• Care about the societal implications of the technology you build
• Have 5 years of software engineering experience

Strong candidates may also have

• Maintained a project built on the Claude Agent SDK
• Experience managing an open source project on GitHub triaging issues prioritizing what to take on and engaging with community contributors
• Experience scaling TypeScript or Python library codebases
• Shipped SDKs or APIs used by external developers in production
• Opinions about API versioning backwards compatibility and managing ecosystem migrations

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