Staff+ Software Engineer, Consumer

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're a small zero-to-one team at Anthropic building brand new consumer AI products. Our mandate: put the full power of frontier Claude models in people's hands, in products that don't exist yet.

You'd be a founding engineer, and engineers here own products end to end. You won't be handed a spec. You'll come up with the bet, shape a vague idea into the leanest real version one, and ship it. Most zero-to-one bets don't work the first time, so you'll keep pushing new products over the line. If you'd rather have a clear spec and a stable surface, that's a valid preference. It's just not this team.

Claude is already one of the most-used AI products in the world. What we build shapes how millions of people use AI every day. The pace is fast and the products are new. If you love building consumer products from scratch and care about getting the details right, we'd like to hear from you.

Key responsibilities

• Originate new consumer AI product bets and own them from first idea to launch
• Spot the gap between what Claude can do and what people actually experience, and bring the bet: what to build, why now, and the cheapest way to test it
• Take a vague direction and cut it down to the leanest real version one
• Set technical direction for the products you build
• Own the quality bar for how the product looks and feels, treating latency, responsiveness, and reliability as first-class concerns
• Partner with privacy, security, legal, design, platform teams and external partners to find a path to launch
• Iterate quickly based on user feedback and internal testing
• Keep pushing new products over the line, since most zero-to-one bets don't work the first time

Minimum qualifications

• Experience building consumer-facing products, with a strong emphasis on product quality and user experience
• Experience taking a consumer product from nothing to real users
• Proficiency in React, Next.js, and TypeScript
• Backend experience with Node.js

Preferred qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building consumer-facing products, with a strong emphasis on product quality and user experience
• Experience founding a company, being on a founding team, or being an early engineer on a new consumer product
• Experience with products that have real-time or streaming interactions (chat interfaces, live updates)
• Experience optimizing performance for consumer web apps, from bundle size and rendering to end-to-end latency
• High agency: you pick a bet and own it without a roadmap
• Relentlessness: you keep going when a bet fails, verify instead of assume, and stay curious rather than frustrated
• Product taste: you care a lot about product craft, and you know what you'd refuse to ship
• Unusually high EQ: you understand other teams' constraints, seek out collaborations that create value for both sides, and can work with any team at Anthropic
• Willingness to pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description

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.

Annual Salary:

$320,000—$405,000 USD

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.