Staff Software Engineer, Developer Productivity (Dev Environments) - Claude Code

Anthropic•San Francisco, NY

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Anthropic is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own the end-to-end development environment for their engineers and researchers. The goal is to minimize time spent on infrastructure tasks like booting containers or resolving dependencies, allowing more focus on AI safety research. The role involves making development environments fast, designing secure isolation boundaries for experimentation, and building a pre-push validation layer. The engineer will also influence the evolution of the repository and platform topology, collaborating with infrastructure teams. A key aspect of this role is integrating AI coding assistants into the development workflow, as agentic coding is both a tool and a requirement for the environments being built.

Requirements

Significant professional software engineering experience in backend or developer infrastructure domains
Proficiency in Python
Hands-on experience with containers (Docker or equivalent), Kubernetes, and pod-level operations
Prior ownership of a developer environment, build system, or paved-path workflow used by a multi-team engineering organization, with demonstrable adoption
Experience working across team boundaries to deliver infrastructure that other engineers depend on
Daily, hands-on use of AI coding assistants as part of your own development workflow

Nice To Haves

7+ years of backend or developer infrastructure engineering experience
Experience with Rust or Go
A track record of reducing cold-start or boot time on a complex multi-service stack to under a minute, with before/after measurements
Prior design of environment isolation models such as ephemeral environments, sandboxes, or isolated namespaces
Experience leading (or making the case against) a monorepo extraction, repo split, or comparable scope-boundary migration from the developer-tooling side
Familiarity with Bazel, Buck, Nix, or similar hermetic build systems
Experience operating as a platform tech lead — broad context across the stack and a history of cross-team influence

Responsibilities

Own the local and hosted development environment end to end — container lifecycle, dependency provisioning, hot reload, and the single command an engineer runs to start working
Drive down cold-start time for fresh development environments and keep it low as the codebase grows
Design and implement the environment isolation model (sandboxes, ephemeral environments, namespace separation) that lets engineers experiment freely without risk to shared systems
Build and maintain the pre-push validation surface so failures are caught on the engineer's machine, not in CI
Partner with platform, delivery infrastructure, and tooling teams to shape the repository and service topology that best supports a fast inner loop
Act as a technical lead across team boundaries — gathering requirements, building consensus, and advocating for the approach that's right for engineers across Anthropic