Staff+ Software Engineer, Platform Safety

About Anthropic

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

Platform Safety builds the infrastructure that lets Anthropic bring its most capable models to more people, safely and securely. Our systems decide both who can access our most advanced models, and what capabilities they can access, wherever Claude is available. That includes identity and business verification, trusted access programs, and the core services that grant, hold and enforce model access across our products. These systems already power the Cyber Verification Program, which now includes Project Glasswing, and the Life Sciences Verification Program with further more advanced use cases in development.

As a Staff+ engineer, you'll help set the technical direction for this work. The foundations are live and adoption is growing quickly, so the next challenge is scale: making access a matter of configuration instead of code, making verification reusable, and giving customers a consistent experience on every surface. You'll work closely with safeguards, product, design and research to turn safety policy into systems that are easy to use and enforce. You'll also take new 0 → 1 efforts from idea to delivery as new capabilities and programs emerge.

What you'll do

You'll design, build and operate the systems that decide who gets access to our most capable models. You'll build the platform that lets teams across Anthropic launch and run trusted access programs, moving access rules out of code and into data so that launching a new model or complex program is simple and scalable. You'll build out our identity and business verification system (KYC/KYB) as a reusable service that any program can use, which means integrating verification vendors, protecting sensitive personal data, expanding into new regions, and building fair review and appeal paths for customers. You'll also evolve the core services behind every access decision, including the services that grant and hold access and the customer and user identity models they rely on, and keep them highly available and consistent across our own products and cloud platforms.

You'll shape the architecture through clear written proposals, review key designs, and mentor engineers on a growing team. You'll also share on-call, lead incident response, and support emerging new programs.

You might be a good fit if you:

• Have a minimum of 8 years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer, ideally at tech lead level or equivalent, and are comfortable working across the stack when the problem calls for it
• Have strong product sense, and work closely with cross-functional partners, including non-engineers, to shape and execute strategy in new domains
• Use AI tools as a regular part of how you design, build and review software
• Have designed and operated production distributed systems on a critical path, where correctness, latency and availability all matter
• Take full ownership of your work, from design through build, deployment, operations and iteration
• Navigate ambiguity and make sound technical decisions independently, have set technical direction that other engineers and teams adopted, and have ideally operated in both 0 → 1 and more mature settings
• Care about building robust, scalable systems that other engineers and businesses love to use
• Care about the societal impacts of your work and Anthropic's mission to build safe, beneficial AI

Strong candidates may also have:

• Identity, access control or authorization systems at scale
• Fraud, risk, trust and safety, or KYC/KYB systems, including working with verification vendors
• Regulated or compliance-sensitive environments, including handling sensitive personal data
• Integrating with cloud platforms or partner ecosystems such as AWS, Google Cloud and Azure

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. 

Location Preference: Preference will be given to candidates based in NY, SEA, SF or the Bay Area given the current location of team. 

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below. 

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:$405,000—$485,000 USD

Logistics

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

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

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.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

For roles performing work in California: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records or criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed.  Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.