Staff Software Engineer, Labs: Applied AI

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

Staff Software Engineer, Applied AI role at Anthropic focused on building full-stack applications that bring frontier AI capabilities into workflows for non-technical professionals in less software-native roles. The role involves rapid prototyping, user immersion in unfamiliar domains, collaboration with research teams, and rigorous experimentation to validate product concepts, aiming to ship early and often to maximize learning in an ambiguous, uncharted territory.

What you'd actually do

  1. Rapidly prototype full-stack applications that bring frontier AI into workflows that have never been software-first, shipping early and often to maximize learning
  2. Immerse yourself in unfamiliar domains: sit with users, learn how their work actually gets done, and encode that understanding into products, evaluations, and workflows
  3. Collaborate closely with research teams to understand new model capabilities and translate them into tools that non-technical professionals reach for first
  4. Work directly with internal teams and external partners across industries to gather feedback, iterate quickly, and validate (or invalidate) product concepts
  5. Design and run structured experiments to test hypotheses, balancing creative exploration with rigorous evaluation

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of experience building full-stack applications
  • track record of zero-to-one work in startup or startup-like environments
  • Deep curiosity about how other industries work
  • Translating messy, real-world workflows into simple software
  • Thrive in ambiguity and energized by uncertainty
  • Hacker mentality: high agency, bias toward shipping, comfort with technical debt
  • Deeply user-centric
  • Validate ideas with actual users
  • Articulate learnings from failed or killed projects without defensiveness
  • Generalist who can transition between different problem spaces
  • Work independently with good judgment
  • Communicate effectively
  • Make complex AI capabilities feel intuitive to people who don't think in software
  • Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work

Nice to have

  • Experience building products for industries outside of tech
  • Previous career, or deep hands-on exposure, in a field outside of software
  • Background conducting embedded or field-based discovery
  • Experience integrating with the systems these industries actually run on
  • Experience shipping software or AI applications to non-technical or frontline users
  • Hands-on applied AI experience
  • Experience collaborating directly with research teams in AI/ML environments

What the JD emphasized

  • zero-to-one work in startup or startup-like environments
  • shipping early and often
  • comfortable with ambiguity
  • hacker mentality
  • bias toward shipping
  • shipping software or AI applications to non-technical or frontline users

Other signals

  • building applications for non-technical users
  • translating frontier AI capabilities into products
  • shipping early and often to maximize learning
  • comfortable with ambiguity and building in uncharted territory