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.
About the job
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
Python, Go, Java, Distributed Systems, API Design, Cloud Infrastructure, Kubernetes, Docker, Postgres, Redis, AWS, GCP, Terraform, Prometheus
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