Software Engineer, Platform
Content + Source + Freshness • 17 Dec 2025 • 95% confidence
Offer value
High value score due to competitive salary range, significant career growth opportunities, and the innovative work environment focused on AI safety.
- Salary: $320,000–$405,000/year
- Innovative role in AI system development
- Flexible organizational placement to maximize impact
- Requires substantial experience in engineering
Pros
- Salary range of $320,000 to $405,000/year is competitive for the tech industry
- Work directly on foundational AI products with significant societal impact
- Flexible placement within the company, allowing for personal growth and interests alignment
Cons
- Expectations may be high in terms of ownership and innovation
- Fast-paced environment may lead to higher work stress
- Limited to onsite presence of at least 25% of time
Who it's for
Senior / Lead • Hybrid/Office
Good fit
- Senior software engineers passionate about AI
- Individuals preferring a dynamic work environment
- Candidates looking for growth in innovative tech
Not recommended for
- Newcomers to the field without relevant experience
- Individuals seeking fully remote arrangements
- Those uncomfortable with high expectations and responsibility
Motivation fit
Key skills
About the job
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 are looking for backend / platform software engineers to join our Product Foundations org. We build foundational primitives that help accelerate product development across Anthropic. Some examples of what we own and maintain are our core sampling pipeline, our rate limiting platform, and our RAG platform.
We have multiple teams that are currently hiring. Team placement occurs after the interview process, taking into account your interests and experience alongside organizational needs. This flexible approach allows us to match talented engineers with the platform efforts where they'll have the greatest impact and growth potential:
Billing Platform: We build and maintain the core billing platform that powers all of Anthropic’s products. You will lead the design and implementation of our billing infrastructure, working at the intersection of our core product, financial systems, and customer-facing features. This role is crucial for scaling our revenue operations, ensuring a seamless customer experience and enables the launch of new and innovative products with complex billing requirements.
Product Platform: We provide a set of stable, powerful, and easy to use shared product capabilities leveraged by the Claude.ai, API and other internal product and research teams. You’ll work on our core platform components like rate limiting, LLM sampling and multimodal processing. Our mandate includes developing reusable components, improving system performance, and creating scalable abstractions that accelerate product development across the organization while maintaining high standards for reliability and security.
Accounts Platform: We build and maintain the critical infrastructure that powers identity and authentication across Anthropic's product suite. We work closely with product teams, security, support, and trust & safety as customers. We create scalable solutions for user authentication, authorization, role-based access control, and single sign-on that form the backbone of our company's identity management operations. We maintain a user-centric approach, building reliable systems that our users and company can depend on as we tackle complex challenges at the intersection of security, scalability, and user experience.
Responsibilities:
- Build and scale platform components to handle Anthropic’s rapid growth
- Design and architect platform components that are composable and deliver value for a variety of use cases
- Collaborate closely with product teams to understand their needs and build platform capabilities that accelerate their feature delivery
- Make build vs buy decisions, evaluating and implementing 3rd party solutions when most impactful
- Set technical direction and vision for various product and platform features
- Partner with research to quickly prototype and launch new capabilities based on research breakthroughs
You might be a good fit if you:
- Have 6+ years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer building scalable distributed systems
- Have strong coding skills and experience with service-oriented architectures
- Have worked in early start-up or otherwise fast moving, rapidly evolving environments, and have ideally built products from 0 to 1
- Take full ownership of your work, navigate ambiguity effectively, and proactively overcome obstacles to deliver results
- Are comfortable diving into any part of the system, whether it's infrastructure, services, or product frontends, to deliver effective solutions
- Enjoy working with a fast-paced team tackling cutting-edge problems in AI safety and conversational AI
- Take a product-focused approach and care about building solutions that are robust, scalable, and easy to use
- Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
- Have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or comparable experience
Strong candidates may also:
- Have worked with NLP and ML models and understand their capabilities and limitations
- Have experience with REST APIs
- Have experience with React and Frontend frameworks
The expected base compensation for this position is below. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation.
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.
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
