Senior Staff Software Engineer, API

About the Position

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.

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.

Requirements

• 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, Golang, Rust
• Infrastructure: GCP, AWS, Azure, Kubernetes
• Databases: PostgreSQL (AlloyDB), Vector Stores, Firestore, Spanner
• Tools: Feature Flagging, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Claude Code

We Offer

• Competitive salary range: $405,000 - $485,000 USD
• Location Preference: Preference will be given to candidates based in New York or the San Francisco Bay Area.
• Visa sponsorship available for eligible candidates.
• Hybrid work policy: Expected to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time.

About the Company

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.

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.

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.