Staff+ Software Engineer, Privacy

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems that are safe and beneficial for users and society.

As one of our first dedicated privacy engineers, you will help establish the privacy engineering function at Anthropic and shape how privacy is designed into our AI systems from the ground up. You'll sit within our Data Infrastructure team, architecting privacy-preserving systems, leading the implementation of privacy-enhancing technologies across our infrastructure, and providing technical leadership on privacy across engineering, research, and product teams.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and implement privacy-preserving architectures for AI training and inference systems operating at very large scale, using techniques such as differential privacy, federated learning, and secure multi-party computation.
• Partner with researchers to implement privacy-preserving training methods that protect user data while maintaining model quality.
• Build foundational privacy infrastructure, including automated data discovery, classification, access controls, audit logging, and lifecycle management.
• Architect data governance systems for tracking data lineage, purpose limitation, and retention across distributed AI systems.
• Lead privacy reviews and threat modeling for new models and features, identifying risks and designing scalable mitigations.
• Partner with product and infrastructure teams to embed privacy controls into Claude's inference systems, user interfaces, and data pipelines.
• Develop privacy engineering toolkits and frameworks that enable other engineers to build privacy-preserving features by default.
• Design privacy-preserving analytics and measurement systems that surface useful insights without exposing individual user data.
• Evaluate emerging privacy technologies from academia and industry, and contribute to open-source tooling and AI privacy standards.
• Advise on and advocate for privacy practices as a core part of how we approach AI safety.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Experience applying privacy engineering principles in production systems, including privacy by design, data minimization, and purpose limitation.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or similar languages, with experience building and operating production systems at scale.
• Experience designing and implementing privacy infrastructure for systems with a large user base.
• Experience with data governance, classification, or data lifecycle management systems.
• Experience conducting privacy reviews, threat modeling, or risk assessments.
• Written and verbal communication skills sufficient to build alignment across engineering, research, legal, and product teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience with privacy-enhancing technologies (e.g., differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, secure enclaves, secure multi-party computation).
• Experience building privacy infrastructure or controls for machine learning or AI systems.
• Experience establishing a privacy engineering practice, or being an early hire in a function.
• Experience with distributed systems and cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Experience serving as a technical lead on complex, multi-quarter projects.
• Contributions to open-source privacy tooling, privacy research, or industry standards.
• 12+ years of experience in a software engineering role, including building and operating large-scale infrastructure.
• 3+ years of experience leading large, complex projects as a technical lead.

Logistics:

• Annual Salary: $405,000-$485,000 USD
• Minimum education: Bachelor’s 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.
• Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas!