Senior / Staff Software Engineer - Autonomous Agent Infrastructure

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

We're building the infrastructure that enables Claude to act in the world—booking travel, writing code, calling APIs, managing files, and completing multi-step tasks autonomously. This is foundational work for the next generation of AI capabilities.

The Agent Infrastructure team designs and operates the execution environments, state management systems, and security boundaries that make autonomous AI agents safe and reliable. You'll work at the intersection of distributed systems, security engineering, and product—building systems that don't exist anywhere else in industry.

This is a high-priority initiative. The problems are hard, the scope is greenfield, and the impact is immediate.

What You'll Do

• Design and build sandboxed compute environments where Claude can safely execute code, access tools, and interact with external services

• Build state management systems for long-running agent tasks—handling checkpoints, recovery, and resumption across failures

• Develop authentication and authorization frameworks for delegated access—enabling Claude to act on behalf of users securely

• Create observability and debugging tools for agent execution—understanding what Claude did, why, and how to make it better

• Partner closely with product and research teams to define what's possible and ship it

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Have 6+ years of experience building distributed systems, infrastructure, or platform services at the hyper scale

• Comfortable building Cloud Native infrastructure on GCP, AWS, or Azure

• Care deeply about security, isolation, and building systems that fail safely

• Have experience with containers, sandboxing, or secure execution environments (e.g., gVisor, Firecracker, V8 isolates)

• Are comfortable with ambiguity—this is greenfield work, and you'll help define the architecture

• Write clean, maintainable code in Python, Go, Rust, or similar

• Want to work on problems that don't have existing playbooks

Strong Candidates May Have

• Experience building multi-tenant execution platforms or serverless infrastructure

• Background in security engineering, sandboxing, or isolation technologies

• Familiarity with workflow orchestration systems (Temporal, Airflow, Step Functions)

• Experience with state machines, checkpointing, or durable execution patterns

• Low-level systems experience (Linux internals, eBPF, container runtimes)

The annual compensation range for this role is 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. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity and benefits.

Annual Salary:
$320,000—$485,000 USD

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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.

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. 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