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

Anthropic•San Francisco, CA

3d•$405,000 - $485,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Every minute an Anthropic engineer or researcher spends waiting on a container to boot, a dependency to resolve, or CI to surface a failure that could have been caught locally is a minute not spent on frontier AI safety. The Developer Productivity team owns the inner development loop for the people building Claude — and increasingly, for Claude itself as an engineering collaborator. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to own our development environment end to end. You'll make spinning up a fresh environment fast, design the isolation boundary that keeps local experimentation safely separated from shared research and production infrastructure, and build the pre-push validation layer that catches problems before they ever reach CI. You'll also help shape how our repository and platform topology evolves as the company scales, partnering closely with the infrastructure teams who own the substrate you build on. This team works the way it expects the rest of Anthropic to work: with Claude in the loop. Agentic coding is both how we operate day to day and a core part of what these environments need to support, so we're looking for someone who already builds this way and has informed opinions about where the leverage actually is.

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