Staff Software Engineer, Developer Productivity

Key responsibilities

• Own the local and hosted development environment end to end — container lifecycle, dependency provisioning, hot reload, and the single command an engineer runs to start working
• Drive down cold-start time for fresh development environments and keep it low as the codebase grows
• Design and implement the environment isolation model (sandboxes, ephemeral environments, namespace separation) that lets engineers experiment freely without risk to shared systems
• Build and maintain the pre-push validation surface so failures are caught on the engineer's machine, not in CI
• Partner with platform, delivery infrastructure, and tooling teams to shape the repository and service topology that best supports a fast inner loop
• Act as a technical lead across team boundaries — gathering requirements, building consensus, and advocating for the approach that's right for engineers across Anthropic

Minimum qualifications

• Significant professional software engineering experience in backend or developer infrastructure domains
• Proficiency in Python
• Hands-on experience with containers (Docker or equivalent), Kubernetes, and pod-level operations
• Prior ownership of a developer environment, build system, or paved-path workflow used by a multi-team engineering organization, with demonstrable adoption
• Experience working across team boundaries to deliver infrastructure that other engineers depend on
• Daily, hands-on use of AI coding assistants as part of your own development workflow

Preferred qualifications

• 7+ years of backend or developer infrastructure engineering experience
• Experience with Rust or Go
• A track record of reducing cold-start or boot time on a complex multi-service stack to under a minute, with before/after measurements
• Prior design of environment isolation models such as ephemeral environments, sandboxes, or isolated namespaces
• Experience leading (or making the case against) a monorepo extraction, repo split, or comparable scope-boundary migration from the developer-tooling side
• Familiarity with Bazel, Buck, Nix, or similar hermetic build systems
• Experience operating as a platform tech lead — broad context across the stack and a history of cross-team influence

Representative projects

• Rebuilding the dev container image pipeline so a new engineer goes from git clone to a running environment in under 60 seconds
• Designing an ephemeral environment system that gives every branch its own isolated copy of downstream services
• Shipping a pre-push hook framework that runs the relevant subset of tests and lints locally, cutting CI failure rate for first-attempt pushes
• Instrumenting the inner loop to produce a live dashboard of p50/p95 edit-build-test latency across the engineering org
• Authoring the design doc and migration plan for how development environments should evolve alongside a major repository restructure