Senior Staff+ Software Engineer, Voice 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

Were building the infrastructure that lets people talk to Claudereal-time bidirectional voice conversations that feel natural responsive and safe. This is foundational work for how millions of people will interact with AI.

The Voice Platform team designs and operates the serving systems streaming pipelines and APIs that bring Anthropics audio models from research into production across our mobile apps and the Anthropic API. Youll work at the intersection of real-time media low-latency inference and distributed systemsbuilding infrastructure where every millisecond of latency is felt by the user.

We partner closely with the Audio research team who train the speech understanding and generation models and with product teams shipping voice experiences to users. Your job is to make those models fast reliable and delightful to talk to at scale.

What youll do

• Design and build the real-time streaming infrastructure that powers voice conversations with Claudeingesting microphone audio orchestrating model inference and streaming synthesized speech back with minimal latency
• Build low-latency serving systems for speech models optimizing time-to-first-audio and end-to-end conversational responsiveness
• Develop the public and internal APIs that expose voice capabilities to mobile clients and third-party developers
• Own the audio transport layercodecs jitter buffers adaptive bitrate packet loss recoveryso conversations stay smooth across unreliable networks
• Build observability and quality-measurement systems for voice: latency distributions audio quality metrics interruption handling and turn-taking accuracy
• Partner with Audio research to move new model architectures from experiment to production and feed real-world performance data back into research
• Collaborate with mobile and product engineering on client-side audio capture playback and the end-to-end user experience

You may be a good fit if you

• Have 6 years of experience building distributed systems real-time infrastructure or platform services at scale
• Have shipped production systems where latency is measured in tens of milliseconds and users notice when you miss
• Are comfortable working across the stackfrom transport protocols and serving infrastructure up to the APIs product teams build on
• Are results-oriented with a bias toward flexibility and impact
• Pick up slack even if it goes outside your job description
• Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
• Care about the societal impacts of voice AI and want to help shape how these systems are developed responsibly
• Are comfortable with ambiguityvoice is a fast-moving space and youll help define the architecture as we learn what works

Strong candidates may also have experience with

• Real-time media protocols and stacks: WebRTC RTP gRPC bidirectional streaming or WebSockets at scale
• Audio engineering fundamentals: codecs (Opus AAC) voice activity detection echo cancellation jitter buffering or audio DSP
• Low-latency ML inference serving streaming model outputs or GPU-based serving infrastructure
• Telephony live streaming video conferencing or voice assistant platforms
• Mobile audio pipelines on iOS (AVAudioEngine AudioUnits) or Android (Oboe AAudio)
• Working alongside ML researchers to productionize modelsspeech experience is a plus but not required

Representative projects

• Driving time-to-first-audio below human perceptual thresholds by co-designing the serving pipeline with the Audio research team
• Building a streaming inference orchestrator that interleaves speech recognition LLM reasoning and speech synthesis with overlapping execution
• Designing the voice mode API surface for the Anthropic API so developers can build their own voice agents on Claude
• Implementing graceful barge-in and interruption handling so users can cut Claude off mid-sentence naturally
• Instrumenting end-to-end audio quality metrics and building dashboards that catch regressions before users do

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelors 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 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