Staff Software Engineer, Databases
Anthropic
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 looking for experienced engineers to build and scale the database infrastructure that powers both Claude's product offerings and Anthropic's research initiatives. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Infrastructure team, you will architect and operate database systems that both enable millions of users to interact with Claude and support cutting-edge AI research.
This is a unique opportunity to tackle database challenges at unprecedented scale. You'll develop the database strategy for Anthropic, design systems that handle billions of API requests, create storage solutions that work seamlessly across GCP, AWS, and diverse deployment models, and build the reliable data layer that accelerates research experimentation.
Responsibilities:
- Set the technical direction for database solutions used across Product and Research
- Design and implement database solutions that scale to support millions of users across Claude's product ecosystem
- Build and scale database systems through 100x+ growth while maintaining reliability and performance
- Architect data storage solutions that work seamlessly across GCP, AWS, first-party deployments, third-party deployments, and other environments
- Develop database infrastructure that serves both product and research workloads with different performance characteristics
- Partner with product and research teams to understand data requirements and build infrastructure that accelerates innovation
- Optimize database performance, reliability, and cost efficiency at massive scale
- Make critical build vs. buy decisions for database technologies
You might be a good fit if you:
- Have 8+ years of experience building and scaling database systems
- Possess deep expertise in distributed database architectures and OLTP systems at scale
- Have successfully scaled databases through massive growth at high-growth companies
- Can balance the speed of a startup environment with the reliability needs of production systems
- Excel at technical leadership and cross-functional collaboration
- Are passionate about building the data layer that enables next-generation AI capabilities
Strong candidates may also have:
- Deep expertise scaling PostgreSQL, MySQL, DynamoDB, or similar database systems
- Experience with Redis, Temporal, vector databases, or async job processing frameworks
- Experience building multi-cloud or hybrid cloud database solutions
- Knowledge of database orchestration and automation at scale
- Background at companies known for database excellence
Note: Prior AI/ML infrastructure experience is not required. We value deep infrastructure/databases expertise from any domain.
The expected salary range for this position is:
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