Staff+ Software Engineer, Platform Safety
Designs, builds and operates Anthropic's platform-safety infrastructure that controls who can access its AI models — identity and business verification (KYC/KYB), trusted access programs, and the services that grant, hold and enforce model access. Staff+ backend/platform work on production distributed systems at scale.
- Compensation
- $405K–$485K / yr
- Location
- San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Minimum 8 years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer, ideally at tech lead level or equivalent
- Comfortable working across the stack when the problem calls for it
- Strong product sense; work closely with cross-functional partners including non-engineers
- Use AI tools as a regular part of designing, building and reviewing software
- Designed and operated production distributed systems on a critical path where correctness, latency and availability matter
- Take full ownership from design through build, deployment, operations and iteration
- Navigate ambiguity, make sound technical decisions independently, and have set technical direction others adopted
- Care about building robust, scalable systems other engineers and businesses love to use
- Care about societal impacts of your work and Anthropic's mission to build safe, beneficial AI
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education, training and/or experience in a relevant field
Nice to have
- Operated in both 0→1 and more mature settings
- Identity, access control or authorization systems at scale
- Fraud, risk, trust and safety, or KYC/KYB systems, including working with verification vendors
- Regulated or compliance-sensitive environments, including handling sensitive personal data
- Integrating with cloud platforms or partner ecosystems such as AWS, Google Cloud and Azure
Full description
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.
About the role
Platform Safety builds the infrastructure that lets Anthropic bring its most capable models to more people, safely and securely. Our systems decide both who can access our most advanced models, and what capabilities they can access, wherever Claude is available. That includes identity and business verification, trusted access programs, and the core services that grant, hold and enforce model access across our products. These systems already power the Cyber Verification Program, which now includes Project Glasswing, and the Life Sciences Verification Program with further more advanced use cases in development.
As a Staff+ engineer, you'll help set the technical direction for this work. The foundations are live and adoption is growing quickly, so the next challenge is scale: making access a matter of configuration instead of code, making verification reusable, and giving customers a consistent experience on every surface. You'll work closely with safeguards, product, design and research to turn safety policy into systems that are easy to use and enforce. You'll also take new 0 → 1 efforts from idea to delivery as new capabilities and programs emerge.
What you'll do
You'll design, build and operate the systems that decide who gets access to our most capable models. You'll build the platform that lets teams across Anthropic launch and run trusted access programs, moving access rules out of code and into data so that launching a new model or complex program is simple and scalable. You'll build out our identity and business verification system (KYC/KYB) as a reusable service that any program can use, which means integrating verification vendors, protecting sensitive personal data, expanding into new regions, and building fair review and appeal paths for customers. You'll also evolve the core services behind every access decision, including the services that grant and hold access and the customer and user identity models they rely on, and keep them highly available and consistent across our own products and cloud platforms.
You'll shape the architecture through clear written proposals, review key designs, and mentor engineers on a growing team. You'll also share on-call, lead incident response, and support emerging new programs.
You might be a good fit if you:
- Have a minimum of 8 years of practical experience as a backend or platform engineer, ideally at tech lead level or equivalent, and are comfortable working across the stack when the problem calls for it