Staff Plus Software Engineer (Distributed Systems)

Join Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, as a Staff Plus Software Engineer on the Safeguards team. In this role, you will build distributed and scalable systems to monitor AI models, prevent misuse, and ensure user well-being. You will independently scope and lead complex infrastructure projects, develop monitoring systems, manage deployments across multiple clouds, and design a secure runtime for AI agents. You will also collaborate with engineers, researchers, and legal teams to ensure quick and trusted detection work.

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

USD 320,000 - 485,000

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• Have worked across multiple cloud providers, or built infrastructure designed to be provider-agnostic
• Proficiency in Python, Distributed Systems, and Infrastructure as Code
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• Have experience with sandboxing and isolation technologies (containers, microVMs, network policy) or with a systems language such as Rust
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or comparable experience
• Have built and operated large-scale, distributed infrastructure, such as data platforms, control planes, or job schedulers
• Have experience with integrity, spam, fraud, or abuse detection and mitigation
• 8+ years of experience in a software engineering position, not including internships
• Have experience running LLM-based agents in production
• Have built systems that handle sensitive or regulated data, with requirements around access control, auditability, retention, and data residency