Senior Staff Software Engineer, API
Anthropic · San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY ·
- Seniority
- Staff
- Category
- Software engineering
- Experience
- 12+ years
- Visa sponsorship
- Yes
- Company size
- 501-1000
- Salary
- USD 405,000 – 485,000 / year
Anthropic · San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY ·
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Lead the technical strategy for Anthropic’s Claude API, defining multi-year roadmaps and guiding distributed systems that power AI model access for developers and enterprises.
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.
Anthropic is seeking an exceptional Senior Staff Software Engineer to join the Claude Developer Platform team and serve as the senior-most individual contributor across API Engineering. Since launch, the Claude API has seen rapid growth and adoption by companies of all sizes to build AI applications with our industry-leading models. The API serves as the primary channel for safely and broadly distributing AI's benefits across all sectors of the economy.
This role sets the technical direction for the systems that make Claude accessible to developers, enterprises, and partners at scale. You will operate at the intersection of technical strategy and execution, partnering closely with Research, Inference, Platform, Infrastructure, and Safeguards to ensure the Claude API is reliable, capable, and positioned to grow with Anthropic's ambitions.
This is a high-agency role that spans all API Engineering teams: API Core owns the foundational reliability and performance of the Claude API; API Capabilities ships frontier model capabilities—vision, tool use, computer use—directly to developers; API Knowledge builds retrieval and grounding systems that let Claude reason over external data; API Distributability ensures Claude reaches customers wherever they need it, with the enterprise-ready infrastructure to support it; and API Agents builds the infrastructure for long-horizon agentic workflows in production.
Define and drive multi-year technical strategy for the Claude API, setting direction across API Core, Capabilities, Knowledge, Distributability, and Agents.
Identify and personally lead the highest-complexity, highest-impact engineering initiatives spanning multiple teams.
Serve as the primary technical decision-maker for major architectural decisions with org-wide scope.
Partner with Research to evaluate and integrate frontier capabilities; work with Inference and Platform for reliable delivery at scale; collaborate with Infrastructure and Safeguards for reliability, security, and responsible deployment.
Mentor and develop Staff-level engineers across the org.
Drive alignment across Product, GTM, Safety, and beyond while proactively identifying and addressing systemic technical risks.
Have 12+ years of engineering experience with a clear track record operating at Staff or Senior Staff level.
Have demonstrably shaped technical strategy for large-scale API or distributed systems platforms.
Drive the highest-leverage technical outcomes without formal authority—you lead through influence, quality of thinking, and trust.
Have deep expertise in distributed systems and API architecture, and are effective writing design docs, making architectural calls, and coding in critical paths.
Are highly effective across org boundaries—you build trust with Research, Inference, Infrastructure, Safeguards, and business stakeholders alike.
Bring strong product instincts and a craftsperson's approach to API design; you communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical audiences.
Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
Location Preference: Preference will be given to candidates based in New York or the San Francisco Bay Area as these positions are part of an SF- or NY-based 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.
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.
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 directly for confirmed position openings.
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.
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.
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