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Software Engineer, API Product (Backend)

San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY

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

Anthropic is seeking talented and experienced Software Engineers to join our API team and help build the world's most trusted AI platform for developers. Since launch, the Anthropic 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. You'll work on building and scaling frontier model capabilities while ensuring they're easy to use, safe, and provide a world-class developer experience.

We have two specialized teams that are currently hiring. Team placement occurs after the interview process, taking into account your interests and experience alongside organizational needs:

API Capabilities: You'll work on shipping the world's most intelligent and capable APIs, partnering directly with research to bring frontier capabilities to developers. This team owns core capabilities including vision, tool use, computer use, and prompt caching. Your work will directly impact how developers interact with our most advanced models.

API Knowledge: You'll focus on transforming Claude into a true knowledge worker by ensuring the model has access to and understanding of the right knowledge at the right time. You'll work on making it possible for developers to securely give Claude access to their data while automatically processing and retrieving relevant information. You'll partner directly with research to bring state-of-the-art retrieval advancements to developers.

Responsibilities:

  • Design and implement products that we launch in the Anthropic API, serving hundreds of thousands of developers
  • Partner with research teams to productize cutting-edge model capabilities
  • Participate in API design reviews to ensure consistent, intuitive developer experiences
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ship a world-class product
  • Support and debug production issues through on-call rotations
  • Design processes (e.g. postmortem review, incident response, on-call rotations) that help the team operate effectively and never fail the same way twice

You might be a good fit if you:

  • Have 8+ years of relevant industry experience, 3+ years leading large scale, complex projects or teams as an engineer or tech lead
  • Are passionate about designing tasteful APIs and developer-focused products
  • Enjoy talking directly with users and view "product" as part of your job
  • Can work independently and thrive in a fast-paced environment
  • Have deep expertise in distributed systems and API architecture
  • Have excellent written and verbal communication skills to build consensus with stakeholders

Technical Stack

  • Languages: Python, TypeScript
  • Frameworks: FastAPI, React
  • Infrastructure: GCP, Kubernetes, Cloud Run
  • Databases: PostgreSQL (AlloyDB), Vector Stores
  • Tools: Statsig, Prometheus, Grafana

The expected salary range for this position is:

Annual Salary:

$405,000 - $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.

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.

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