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AnthropicAnthropicSan Francisco, CA

Staff+ Software Engineer, Backend

Staff backend engineer owns scalable systems for Anthropic's API, Claude.ai, and developer tools across teams like API Core and Enterprise Foundations. Requires 8+ years experience leading complex projects, distributed systems, and cross-team alignment in fast-paced AI environment.

405k – 485k/yr
Hybrid8+ YOEBackend Engineering

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Own backend systems powering API, Claude Code, and Claude.ai.
  • Scope complex, multi-month projects through ambiguous problem spaces.
  • Lead peers through technical and product decisions.
  • Drive alignment with product, engineering, and research teams.
  • Make architectural decisions for reliability and scalability serving hundreds of thousands of users.
  • Design processes to operate effectively and prevent repeated failures.
  • Stay hands-on with code and models.

Team Options:

  • API Core: Build/scale Claude API foundation, own performance/reliability/efficiency, partner with inference/safeguards.
  • API Capabilities: Bring model capabilities (vision, tool use, computer use) to developers, launch models, productionize research.
  • API Knowledge: Enable knowledge access/retrieval, secure data access for developers.
  • Developer Experience: Build tools for developers to use LLMs, accelerate from idea to deployment.
  • API Agents: Build infrastructure for agentic apps (tool use, multi-step reasoning, long-running tasks).
  • Enterprise Foundations: Build user/permissions management, security/compliance, analytics for enterprise scale.

Requirements

  • 8+ years relevant experience as backend/product engineer.
  • Track record leading complex projects/teams as tech lead.
  • Strong coding fundamentals across backend, APIs, integrations (frontend when needed).
  • Led design/delivery of large-scale backend systems for high-adoption products.
  • Drive alignment across teams, clear communication, influence decisions.
  • Product-focused: robust, scalable, easy-to-use solutions.
  • Invest in peer mentorship/growth.
  • Experience with distributed systems, API design, cloud infrastructure at scale.
  • Thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.

Nice-to-Haves

  • Technical lead/architect on product/API platform.
  • Designing/scaling APIs focused on developer experience.
  • Enterprise SaaS (permissions, billing, compliance for regulated industries).
  • Industry vertical experience (financial, healthcare, legal).
  • Partnering with ML/AI research to productize capabilities.
  • Building agentic systems, orchestration, developer tools (CLI, IDE, AI-coding).
  • Products with adoption/activation challenges (funnels, drop-off).
  • Operational processes (incident response, on-call, postmortems).

Compensation

Annual Salary: $405,000—$485,000 USD

Skills

PythonGoJavaDistributed SystemsAPI DesignCloud InfrastructureKubernetesDockerPostgresRedisAWSGCPTerraformPrometheus

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