Staff+ Software Engineer, Databases

Key Responsibilities

• Drive the technical direction for database solutions used across Product and Research
• Design and implement database solutions that scale to support millions of users across Claude's product ecosystem
• Build and scale database systems through 100x+ growth while maintaining reliability and performance
• Build the database platform that lets Anthropic engineers ship without thinking about databases or scaling
• Architect data storage solutions that operate across GCP, AWS, first-party deployments, third-party deployments, and other environments
• Develop database infrastructure that serves both product and research workloads with different performance characteristics
• Build data movement infrastructure (migration tooling, backfill, and change data capture pipelines) that safely consolidates and moves data across the organization
• Design and operate caching infrastructure, including CDC-driven cache invalidation, that keeps Anthropic's hottest paths fast and correct
• Partner with product and research teams to understand data requirements and build infrastructure that accelerates their work
• Optimize database performance, reliability, and cost efficiency at scale
• Make build-vs-buy decisions for database technologies

Minimum Qualifications

• Significant experience as a software engineer building and operating production database or storage systems
• Deep knowledge of distributed database architectures and OLTP systems at scale
• Proficiency with SQL and at least one major relational or distributed database engine (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, Spanner, CockroachDB, DynamoDB)
• Track record of leading large, complex infrastructure projects as an engineer or tech lead
• Ability to balance moving quickly with the reliability needs of production systems
• Strong technical leadership and cross-functional collaboration skills

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years building and scaling database systems, with 3+ years leading large-scale projects or teams
• Experience scaling databases through periods of rapid growth at high-growth companies
• Experience operating Spanner, CockroachDB, TiDB, AlloyDB, or other globally distributed SQL databases in production
• Experience with Redis, Temporal, vector databases, or async job processing frameworks
• Experience with change data capture (Debezium or similar), large-scale data migration, or streaming data infrastructure
• Experience building multi-cloud or hybrid cloud database solutions
• Knowledge of database orchestration and automation at scale
• Contributions to database internals, storage engines, or related open source projects

Note: Prior AI/ML infrastructure experience is not required. We value deep infrastructure and database expertise from any domain.

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.