Software Engineer, Claude Design

Anthropic•San Francisco, NY

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

Anthropic is building AI systems that are safe, beneficial, and transformative, with a mission to develop AI that benefits humanity. Claude Design is a new product from Anthropic Labs, designed to let anyone collaborate with AI to create visual work such as interactive prototypes, product mockups, slides, one-pagers, and marketing collateral. Engineers joining now will play a key role in defining the future of this product. This is a craft-heavy, frontend-leaning role focused on creating intuitive design experiences that make AI-generated design a preferred tool. The role involves working at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world application, rapidly building and testing new experiences, partnering with researchers and users, and contributing to product direction.

Requirements

8+ years of experience building full-stack applications with deep frontend strength, and a track record of zero-to-one work in startup or startup-like environments.
Experience setting technical direction for a team or workstream and mentoring other engineers, while staying hands-on in the code.
Strong design sensibility and a high bar for craft; you sweat interaction details, motion, and polish.
Strong technical skills across modern web stacks (React, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Go, etc.), including complex client-side state, performance, APIs, databases, and cloud technologies.
Comfortable working in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift and shipping quickly matters.
Deeply user-centric: you enjoy validating ideas with actual users before over-investing and you talk about problems before solutions.
Hold strong opinions loosely: you advocate forcefully for ideas but change your mind based on evidence.
A generalist who can move comfortably between frontend, backend, and product problems as the work demands.
Ability to work independently with good judgment about what matters, without needing constant direction.
Effective communication skills and ability to translate complex AI capabilities into intuitive experiences.
Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work.
Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.
A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.

Nice To Haves

Extensive experience working with or building visual collaboration & creative tools (e.g., Figma, Canva, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc), and have strong opinions on how they could become more magical experiences.
Hands-on experience with UI/UX for AI-powered applications, and fluency collaborating closely with designers.
Background conducting user research, interviews, and usability testing.
Deep frontend expertise in canvas rendering, complex editor UIs, design-system tooling, or graphics work (WebGL/shaders, 3D, animation).
Experience with real-time, collaborative applications (multiplayer editing, WebSockets) or complex, high-performance frontend interactions.
Formal certifications or education credentials.
Direct machine learning or AI research experience.

Responsibilities

Build and ship Claude Design's core surfaces (the design canvas, real-time editing, inline comments, and the live adjustment controls Claude generates), shipping early and often to maximize learning.
Collaborate closely with research teams to turn frontier vision and generation capabilities into intuitive, high-craft design experiences.
Work directly with designers, internal test users, and external partners to gather feedback, iterate quickly, and validate (or invalidate) product concepts.
Set technical direction for the hardest frontend problems: editor and canvas architecture, real-time collaboration, design-system inference, rich import/export, and performance as the product scales.
Design and run experiments to test product hypotheses, from prototype tests with users to evaluations of generation quality, balancing creative exploration with rigorous measurement.
Own the quality bar for how the product looks and feels, treating latency, responsiveness, and reliability as first-class concerns rather than afterthoughts, and advocate for user experience and design considerations early in the process.
Strengthen the handoff to Claude Code so designs translate cleanly into production, and feed insights back to research about model effectiveness and where capabilities can improve.
Operate as a technical leader on a small team: shape the roadmap alongside design and product, make pragmatic architecture decisions, and mentor engineers as the team grows.