Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience

We’re looking for an experienced software engineer to improve code quality across our codebase by improving our CI system, test harness, static analyzers, and related tools. In this role, you’ll have a big impact on engineering productivity across the company: while our model-building tooling is world-class, there’s still enormous room for improvement.

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.

Responsibilities:

Create fast, secure, repeatable developer environments to enable our developers and researchers to quickly move forward without compromising on security
Secure our code to protect against advanced threat actors
Implement CI and Static Analysis systems to identify issues before they impact users or researchers.

You might be a good fit if you:

Have strong instincts for code quality and robustness
Are comfortable debugging large-scale software systems
Enjoy close collaboration with engineers and researchers with a variety of backgrounds and expertise
Care about the societal impacts of your work
Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description

Strong candidates may also have:

Experience with Source Control tools such as git or mercurial
Experience with build and packaging systems such as Docker, Python setuptools, or Nix
Experience with linters and type checkers such as Flake8, Black, Mypy or Pyright
5+ years experience

Representative Projects:

Support a fast, secure developer environment by:
Securing access to our models without negatively impacting productivity through cutting-edge security practices like two-party controls
Supporting fast development loops and sharing through Notebooks.

Improve Anthropic’s codebase-wide code quality by:

Adding additional static analyzers or static analysis rules, while keeping the development feedback loop fast
Ensuring dependencies are up-to-date and proactively increasing test coverage of dependencies
Creating and improving novel debugging tools for large asynchronous and multiprocessing codebases
Understanding notification strategies holistically and helping users control their notification preferences
Speeding up cold image pulls and allocation of agents

Annual Salary (USD)

The expected salary range for this position is $280k – $375k.

Logistics

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in our office at least 25% of the time.

Deadline to apply:
None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

US visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren’t able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate; operations roles are especially difficult to support. But if we make you an offer, we will make every effort to get you into the United States, 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.

Compensation and Benefits*
Anthropic’s compensation package consists of three elements: salary, equity, and benefits. We are committed to pay fairness and aim for these three elements collectively to be highly competitive with market rates.

Equity – On top of this position’s salary (listed above), equity will be a major component of the total compensation. We aim to offer higher-than-average equity compensation for a company of our size, and communicate equity amounts at the time of offer issuance.

Benefits – Benefits we offer include:
– Optional equity donation matching at a 3:1 ratio, up to 50% of your equity grant.
– Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and all your dependents.
– 401(k) plan with 4% matching.
– 21 weeks of paid parental leave.
– Unlimited PTO – most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more!
– Stipends for education, home office improvements, commuting, and wellness.
– Fertility benefits via Carrot.
– Daily lunches and snacks in our office.
– Relocation support for those moving to the Bay Area.

* This compensation and benefits information is based on Anthropic’s good faith estimate for this position, in San Francisco, CA, as of the date of publication and may be modified in the future. The level of pay within the range will depend on a variety of job-related factors, including where you place on our internal performance ladders, which is based on factors including past work experience, relevant education, and performance on our interviews or in a work trial.

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.  We’re trying to build a core of knowledge and intuition about the most robustly effective innovations in AI, and so thoroughly-documented null results are almost as valuable as positive discoveries. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both as needed.

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 based 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.