Staff Software Engineer, Claude Design

Anthropic•Seattle, WA

8h•$320,000 - $485,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Anthropic's mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. Claude Design is the newest product from Anthropic Labs, the internal accelerator behind Claude Code and MCP. It lets anyone collaborate with Claude to create polished visual work: interactive prototypes, product mockups, slides, one-pagers, and marketing collateral. The engineers who join now will define what it becomes. This is a craft-heavy, frontend-leaning role where you'll create the canvas, real-time editing, design-system inference, and AI-driven generation experiences. You'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world application, rapidly building and testing new experiences, partnering directly with researchers and users, and helping to generate the crucial insights that shape where the product goes next.

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
Have set technical direction for a team or workstream and mentored 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
Work independently with good judgment about what matters, without needing constant direction
Communicate effectively and translate complex AI capabilities into intuitive experiences
Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work

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

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