Staff+ Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

The job

LIVE Employer public job feed (private-sector employer) Source: the employer's public careers feed · Data: listed 2026-09-15

Job 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

We are looking for software engineers to help build safety and oversight mechanisms for our AI systems. As a software engineer on the Safeguards team, you will work to monitor models, prevent misuse, and ensure user well-being. This role will focus on building distributed and scalable systems to detect unwanted model behaviors and prevent disallowed use of models. You will apply your technical skills to uphold our principles of safety, transparency, and oversight while enforcing our terms of service and acceptable use policies.

Responsibilities:

• Independently scope and lead complex, multi-month infrastructure projects, from an ambiguous starting point through to a production system
• Develop monitoring systems to detect unwanted behaviors from our API partners and potentially take automated enforcement actions; surface these in internal dashboards to analysts for manual review
• Stand up and run deployments of those monitoring systems across multiple clouds, including inside cloud-provider partner environments where data residency laws apply. Keep the deployments consistent through shared deployment pipelines, smoke tests, observability, and alerting
• Design and harden the sandboxed runtime that AI agents execute in: isolation, network egress controls, least-privilege data access, audit logging, and insider-risk controls
• Manage cost and capacity for large volumes of long-running agent work, and set and meet service-level objectives for the platform
• Partner with the engineers and researchers who write and evaluate the monitoring agents, and with security, privacy, and legal teams, so new detection work can ship quickly on a platform everyone trusts

You may be a good fit if you:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or comparable experience
• Proficiency in Python, Distributed Systems, and Infrastructure as Code
• Have worked across multiple cloud providers, or built infrastructure designed to be provider-agnostic
• Have built and operated large-scale, distributed infrastructure, such as data platforms, control planes, or job schedulers
• Have experience with sandboxing and isolation technologies (containers, microVMs, network policy) or with a systems language such as Rust
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders

Strong candidates may also:

• 8+ years of experience in a software engineering position, not including internships
• Have built systems that handle sensitive or regulated data, with requirements around access control, auditability, retention, and data residency
• Have experience running LLM-based agents in production
• Have experience with integrity, spam, fraud, or abuse detection and mitigation

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

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below. 

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

For roles performing work in California: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records or criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.

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.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

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.

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 headquartered 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. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.

Explore around this job

Field: Technology Sub-niche: Software engineering All jobs at Anthropic Jobs in New York Jobs in New York City, NY New York state guide

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About the role

This is a — role in the Technology field (Software engineering) at Anthropic.

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How to prepare and behave

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The city

New York City, NY is not one of the cities with its own page in our guides, so here is the state: New York.

The state economy in brief

New York is in the Northeast region (Middle Atlantic division) and has 19,852,366 residents (the 4th largest of the 50 states and DC by population), with a median age of 39.8. Its economy produced about $2,561,197 million in the latest four quarters (BEA), 3rd among states and DC, equal to $129,012 per resident.

Jobs and the labour market

The unemployment rate was 4.3% in 2026M09, which is 36th lowest of 51 (1st is the lowest). Employers had job openings equal to 4.1% of employment, 18th highest of 51, a measure of how hard it is to hire. The median wage across all occupations is $59,670 a year ($28.69 an hour), 17% above the national median ($59,670 against $50,980).

What people do and what it pays

The occupations with the most jobs in New York are Home Health and Personal Care Aides (663,140 jobs, median $39,620); Retail Salespersons (238,540 jobs, median $37,720); General and Operations Managers (206,740 jobs, median $130,860); Registered Nurses (205,810 jobs, median $109,440); Janitors and Cleaners, Except Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners (195,250 jobs, median $41,640). Among occupations with at least 2,000 jobs, the best paid are Cardiologists (median $492,040); Anesthesiologists (median $445,660); Radiologists (median $441,580). Compared with the nation, the state is most specialised in healthcare support (1.8 times the national share of workers) and legal (1.7 times the national share of workers).

Cost of living, taxes and workplace rules

Prices are above the national average in New York: the regional price parity is 107.9 against 100 for the whole country (47th lowest of 51). Median gross rent is $1,621 a month and the median household income $85,974, so a year of rent equals 22.6% of income; the median home value is $423,800. The state minimum wage is $16.00 (17.00 in NYC, Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester) (the higher of state and federal rates applies to most workers). State income tax on wages: Graduated, top rate 10.90%. It is not a right-to-work state, so union contracts can require fees from covered workers. It runs a state paid family and medical leave programme.

People and commuting

22.8% of residents were born abroad and 40.2% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher. Among workers, 48.8% drive alone, 21.6% use public transit and 14.9% work from home; 27.4% commute 45 minutes or more.

State guide: New York →

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Career paths

We could not match this title to one occupation, so here are the other sub-niches in Technology, where your skills may carry over:

Cybersecurity (713) Data, analytics and AI (3366) Cloud, IT and infrastructure (1040) Product management (836)

Distances

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The employer

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Same sub-niche: Software engineering

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FAQ

What is the Staff+ Software Engineer, Distributed Systems job at Anthropic?

A private-sector role in technology (software engineering) listed 55 days ago. The full description is on this page and on the employer's page.

Where is this job?

New York City, NY.

How do I apply?

Use the "View this job and apply on the employer's page" button. AtiveSite does not receive applications.

How much does it pay?

The listing does not publish pay, and we could not match the title to one official occupation.

What is the cost of living there?

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How old is this listing?

It was posted on 2026-09-15 (55 days ago). Jobs older than 90 days are not shown.

Are there similar jobs?

Yes: browse software engineering jobs in New York.

Sources and terms

• Job data: Anthropic careers page public feed (listing dated 2026-09-15). The job disappears from this site when it disappears from the source.
• Wages and projections: BLS OEWS (May 2025) and Employment Projections 2025–35.
• City and county figures: Census Bureau ACS 2020–2024, BEA, BLS QCEW and LAUS, NASA POWER climatology; distances from Census Gazetteer coordinates.

AtiveSite is not affiliated with or endorsed by the employer or any government agency, and does not process applications. Verify every detail with the employer before acting.

Sources

• BLS OEWS (wages and employment by occupation, May 2025)
• BLS Employment Projections 2025–35
• BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics
• BLS JOLTS
• BLS State and Metro Area Employment
• Census Bureau American Community Survey (via Census Reporter)
• BEA GDP by state and Regional Price Parities
• IRS 2026 tax adjustments
• U.S. Department of Labor, minimum wage by state
• Tax Foundation state income tax rates 2026
• USAJOBS
• USCIS
• U.S. Department of State, visas
• NASA POWER climatology
• GeoNames / Census Gazetteer (coordinates)