Senior / Staff+ Software Engineer, Voice Platform

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're building the infrastructure that lets people talk to Claude—real-time, bidirectional voice conversations that feel natural, responsive, and safe. This is foundational work for how millions of people will interact with AI.

The Voice Platform team designs and operates the serving systems, streaming pipelines, and APIs that bring Anthropic's audio models from research into production across Claude.ai, our mobile apps, and the Anthropic API. You'll work at the intersection of real-time media, low-latency inference, and distributed systems—building infrastructure where every millisecond of latency is felt by the user.

We partner closely with the Audio research team, who train the speech understanding and generation models, and with product teams shipping voice experiences to users. Your job is to make those models fast, reliable, and delightful to talk to at scale.

What you'll do

• Design and build the real-time streaming infrastructure that powers voice conversations with Claude—ingesting microphone audio, orchestrating model inference, and streaming synthesized speech back with minimal latency
• Build low-latency serving systems for speech models, optimizing time-to-first-audio and end-to-end conversational responsiveness
• Develop the public and internal APIs that expose voice capabilities to Claude.ai, mobile clients, and third-party developers
• Own the audio transport layer—codecs, jitter buffers, adaptive bitrate, packet loss recovery—so conversations stay smooth across unreliable networks
• Build observability and quality-measurement systems for voice: latency distributions, audio quality metrics, interruption handling, and turn-taking accuracy
• Partner with Audio research to move new model architectures from experiment to production, and feed real-world performance data back into research
• Collaborate with mobile and product engineering on client-side audio capture, playback, and the end-to-end user experience

You may be a good fit if you

• Have 6+ years of experience building distributed systems, real-time infrastructure, or platform services at scale
• Have shipped production systems where latency is measured in tens of milliseconds and users notice when you miss
• Are comfortable working across the stack—from transport protocols and serving infrastructure up to the APIs product teams build on
• Are results-oriented, with a bias toward flexibility and impact
• Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
• Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
• Care about the societal impacts of voice AI and want to help shape how these systems are developed responsibly
• Are comfortable with ambiguity—voice is a fast-moving space, and you'll help define the architecture as we learn what works

Strong candidates may also have experience with

• Real-time media protocols and stacks: WebRTC, RTP, gRPC bidirectional streaming, or WebSockets at scale
• Audio engineering fundamentals: codecs (Opus, AAC), voice activity detection, echo cancellation, jitter buffering, or audio DSP
• Low-latency ML inference serving, streaming model outputs, or GPU-based serving infrastructure
• Telephony, live streaming, video conferencing, or voice assistant platforms
• Mobile audio pipelines on iOS (AVAudioEngine, AudioUnits) or Android (Oboe, AAudio)
• Working alongside ML researchers to productionize models—speech experience is a plus but not required

Representative projects

• Driving time-to-first-audio below human perceptual thresholds by co-designing the serving pipeline with the Audio research team
• Building a streaming inference orchestrator that interleaves speech recognition, LLM reasoning, and speech synthesis with overlapping execution
• Designing the voice mode API surface for the Anthropic API so developers can build their own voice agents on Claude
• Implementing graceful barge-in and interruption handling so users can cut Claude off mid-sentence naturally
• Instrumenting end-to-end audio quality metrics and building dashboards that catch regressions before users do

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

Logistics

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 anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

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