# Staff+ Software Engineer, Backend

**Company**: Anthropic
**Location**: San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: staff
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $405,000-$485,000 USD
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology
**Wikidata**: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q116758847

**Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5174755008
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_2ff13306-80c

## Description

### About the Role

Anthropic is looking for experienced, product-minded engineers to own the backend systems that power user experiences across our API, Claude Code, and Claude.ai.

You'll independently scope complex, multi-month projects through ambiguous problem spaces and lead peers through technical and product decisions; you'll drive alignment with product, peer engineering teams, and research to identify capability gaps and translate frontier model improvements into shipped products.

You'll make architectural decisions that affect the reliability and scalability of systems serving hundreds of thousands of global users (including internal teams), and design processes that help your team operate effectively and never fail the same way twice - all while staying hands-on with the code and our models.

### Teams

We have multiple teams that are currently hiring. Team placement occurs after the interview process, taking into account your interests and experience alongside organisational needs.

- API Core: You'll build and scale the foundation of the Claude API,the systems that deliver Claude's intelligence to every developer, from startups to enterprise.

- API Capabilities: You'll bring frontier model capabilities to developers through the Claude API, owning core features like vision, tool use, and computer use.

- API Knowledge: You'll focus on transforming Claude into a true knowledge worker by ensuring the model has access to and understanding of the right knowledge at the right time.

- Developer Experience: You’ll focus on building products and tools to enable developers to harness the full power of LLMs to create successful, reliable, and groundbreaking applications with ease.

- API Agents: You'll focus on building the infrastructure and APIs that enable developers to create powerful agentic applications within the Claude API.

- Enterprise Foundations: We're looking for a software engineer to join our Enterprise Foundations team,the team that makes Claude enterprise-ready at scale.

### Requirements

- Have 8+ years of relevant experience as a backend or product engineer, with a track record of leading complex, multi-month projects or teams as a tech lead or equivalent.

- Have strong coding fundamentals and are comfortable working across backend systems, APIs, and integrations , and can reach into the frontend when needed to ship an effective solution.

- Have led the design and delivery of large-scale backend systems in production that power high-adoption B2B or consumer-facing products.

- Are skilled at driving alignment across technical and non-technical teams; you communicate clearly, influence technical decisions beyond your immediate team, and help others ramp effectively on your systems.

- Take a product-focused approach to your work and care about building solutions that are robust, scalable, and easy to use.

- Care deeply about investing in the mentorship and growth of your peers.

- Have experience with distributed systems, API design, and cloud infrastructure at scale.

- Thrive in fast-paced environments and can navigate ambiguity to find the highest-leverage path forward.

### Preferred Qualifications

- Served as a technical lead or architect on a product or API platform, owning both the technical vision and execution end-to-end.

- Experience designing and scaling APIs with a focus on developer experience, consistency, and reliability , including API design review processes.

- Deep experience building enterprise SaaS platforms, including permissions infrastructure, billing and pricing systems, or compliance frameworks for regulated industries (SO2, HIPAA).

- Background in a specific industry vertical , financial services, healthcare, or legal technology , with a track record of building products that handle sensitive, domain-specific data.

- Experience partnering with ML/AI research teams to productize model capabilities or identify and address model failure modes in production.

- Experience building agentic systems, orchestration frameworks, or developer tools , including CLI tools, IDE integrations, or AI-assisted coding environments.

- Experience building products where adoption and activation are core challenges , instrumenting funnels, diagnosing drop-off, and shipping the product changes that close gaps.

- Experience designing operational processes (incident response, on-call rotations, postmortem review) for production systems serving large-scale developer or enterprise audiences.

### Compensation

The annual compensation range for this role is $405,000-$485,000 USD.

## Skills

### Required
- backend systems
- APIs
- cloud infrastructure
- distributed systems
- API design
- product development
- team leadership
- communication
- influence
- mentorship
- growth

### Nice to have
- API design review processes
- enterprise SaaS platforms
- permissions infrastructure
- billing and pricing systems
- compliance frameworks
- regulated industries
- ML/AI research teams
- agentic systems
- orchestration frameworks
- developer tools
- CLI tools
- IDE integrations
- AI-assisted coding environments