# Staff Software Engineer, Developer Productivity

**Company:** [Anthropic](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/anthropic)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA, New York, NY
**Role:** DevOps / SRE
**Salary:** $405k – $485k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** Python, Docker, Kubernetes, Rust, Go, Bazel, Buck, Nix, Containers, Build Systems
**Posted:** 2026-06-19

> Staff-level engineer to own end-to-end development environments at Anthropic, focusing on container lifecycle, cold-start optimization, environment isolation, and pre-push validation for AI researchers and engineers.

## Job Description

## 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

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**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/5a672e92-7540-4fb4-aee3-5f2bb4cf9d90
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/5a672e92-7540-4fb4-aee3-5f2bb4cf9d90