Staff+ Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Anthropics 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.

We are looking for software engineers to help build safety and oversight mechanisms for our AI systems. As a software engineer on the Safeguards team you will work to monitor models prevent misuse and ensure user well-being. This role will focus on building distributed and scalable systems to detect unwanted model behaviors and prevent disallowed use of models. You will apply your technical skills to uphold our principles of safety transparency and oversight while enforcing our terms of service and acceptable use policies.

• Independently scope and lead complex multi-month infrastructure projects from an ambiguous starting point through to a production system
• Develop monitoring systems to detect unwanted behaviors from our API partners and potentially take automated enforcement actions; surface these in internal dashboards to analysts for manual review
• Stand up and run deployments of those monitoring systems across multiple clouds including inside cloud-provider partner environments where data residency laws apply. Keep the deployments consistent through shared deployment pipelines smoke tests observability and alerting
• Design and harden the sandboxed runtime that AI agents execute in: isolation network egress controls least-privilege data access audit logging and insider-risk controls
• Manage cost and capacity for large volumes of long-running agent work and set and meet service-level objectives for the platform
• Partner with the engineers and researchers who write and evaluate the monitoring agents and with security privacy and legal teams so new detection work can ship quickly on a platform everyone trusts

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Software Engineering or comparable experience
• Proficiency in Python Distributed Systems and Infrastructure as Code
• Have worked across multiple cloud providers or built infrastructure designed to be provider-agnostic
• Have built and operated large-scale distributed infrastructure such as data platforms control planes or job schedulers
• Have experience with sandboxing and isolation technologies (containers microVMs network policy) or with a systems language such as Rust
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders

• 8 years of experience in a software engineering position not including internships
• Have built systems that handle sensitive or regulated data with requirements around access control auditability retention and data residency
• Have experience running LLM-based agents in production
• Have experience with integrity spam fraud or abuse detection and mitigation

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

Minimum education: Bachelors 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 arent 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 youre interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones were 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 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 youre ever unsure about a communication dont click any linksvisit 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. Were 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 aboutour policy for using AI in our application process.