Staff+ Software Engineer, Backend

Anthropic Anthropic · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · Engineering & Design - Product

Experienced backend engineers to own and scale the backend systems powering Anthropic's user-facing products like API, Claude Code, and Claude.ai. The role involves scoping and leading complex projects, making architectural decisions for reliability and scalability, and translating frontier model improvements into shipped products. Specific teams focus on API core, capabilities (vision, tool use), knowledge integration, developer experience, agent infrastructure, enterprise foundations (security, compliance, analytics), identity/verification, and marketplace platforms.

What you'd actually do

  1. Independently scope complex, multi-month projects through ambiguous problem spaces and lead peers through technical and product decisions
  2. Drive alignment with product, peer engineering teams, and research to identify capability gaps and translate frontier model improvements into shipped products
  3. Make architectural decisions that affect the reliability and scalability of systems serving hundreds of thousands of global users (including internal teams)
  4. Design processes that help your team operate effectively and never fail the same way twice - all while staying hands-on with the code and our models
  5. Own the performance, reliability, and efficiency of our core serving path, ensuring users get the most speed and value from our models

Skills

Required

  • backend systems
  • APIs
  • integrations
  • scalability
  • reliability
  • architectural decision making
  • project leadership
  • collaboration with research and product teams

Nice to have

  • frontend development
  • experience with specific teams (API Core, API Capabilities, API Knowledge, Developer Experience, API Agents, Enterprise Foundations, Passport, Marketplace)

What the JD emphasized

  • 8+ years of relevant experience
  • track record of leading complex, multi-month projects or teams as a tech lead or equivalent
  • strong coding fundamentals
  • comfortable working across backend systems, APIs, and integrations
  • reach into the frontend when needed to ship an effective solution
  • led the design and delivery of large

Other signals

  • shipping products
  • backend systems
  • API
  • Claude.ai
  • Claude Code
  • enterprise readiness
  • scalability
  • reliability