Software Engineer, Sandboxing

Anthropic • $320K — $485K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of software engineering experience in Linux systems programming or kernel development
  • Proficient in systems programming languages like Rust, C, C++, or Go
  • Familiarity with virtualization/container technologies such as KVM, QEMU, or gVisor
  • Understanding of Linux resource management (namespaces, cgroups, etc.)
  • Experience in profiling and debugging system-level performance issues
  • Ability to navigate unfamiliar codebases and deliver practical solutions
  • Strong communication skills with a focus on building reliable systems

Responsibilities

  • Design and operate the sandboxing infrastructure for untrusted code and agent workloads
  • Enhance sandbox startup time, density, and throughput through various techniques
  • Strengthen isolation across compute, filesystem, and network layers
  • Investigate and resolve performance, reliability, and security issues at multiple system levels
  • Develop monitoring and debugging tools for sandbox resource management
  • Collaborate with researchers to support fast, isolated execution for reinforcement learning
  • Work with product engineers to ensure sandboxes are reliable and user-friendly
  • Partner with security teams to model threats and respond to vulnerabilities

Benefits

  • Visa sponsorship available
  • Hybrid work policy requiring 25% in-office presence
  • Opportunity to work on cutting-edge sandboxing technology
  • Collaborative environment with cross-functional teams
  • Focus on building safe and reliable systems
Full Job Description
About the role

Every time Claude runs code, uses a computer, or works as an agent, it does so inside a sandbox. Our Sandboxing team builds the isolation layer behind that work. The same systems run the code Claude writes for users, the environments we train and evaluate models in, and the agents our customers deploy.

These workloads are untrusted by design, and there are a lot of them. Sandboxes need to start in milliseconds, hold up under adversarial code, and scale to a very large number of concurrent sessions. You will work at the boundary between the Linux kernel, virtualization, and the container ecosystem. You will partner with research, product, and security teams to make sure that safe and fast do not trade off against each other.
Key responsibilities
  • Design, build, and operate the sandboxing infrastructure that runs untrusted, model-generated code and agent workloads at scale
  • Improve sandbox startup time, density, and throughput, including snapshot and restore, checkpointing, and warm pools
  • Strengthen isolation across compute, filesystem, and network, including egress controls and per-session credential handling
  • Investigate and fix performance, reliability, and security issues at the kernel, hypervisor, and container runtime level
  • Build the monitoring, tracing, and debugging tools that show where time and resources go inside a sandbox
  • Work with researchers to support reinforcement learning environments and evaluations that need fast, reproducible, isolated execution
  • Work with product and platform engineers to expose sandboxes as a dependable, well-designed capability for Claude products and customers
  • Partner with security teams to threat-model the platform and to test, harden, and respond to escape and abuse scenarios
  • Work with cloud providers on the hardware and platform features that our workloads depend on
  • Share knowledge on systems programming and Linux internals, and help set technical standards for the team
Minimum qualifications
  • Software engineering experience in Linux systems programming, kernel development, or another low-level area
  • Strong programming skills in at least one systems language such as Rust, C, C++, or Go
  • Working knowledge of virtualization or container isolation technologies such as KVM, QEMU, Firecracker, gVisor, or runc
  • Understanding of Linux resource management, including namespaces, cgroups, scheduling, and memory management
  • Experience profiling and debugging performance issues at the system level
  • Ability to work in unfamiliar codebases and technical areas, and to ship practical solutions with measurable results
  • Strong communication skills and a commitment to building safe, reliable systems
Preferred qualifications
  • Experience building or operating a multi-tenant sandbox, serverless, or code execution platform
  • Experience with microVMs, user-space kernels, or lightweight virtualization, including snapshot and restore
  • Experience with OS-level security hardening, including seccomp, LSMs, and threat modeling of untrusted code
  • Experience with eBPF and kernel tracing tools
  • Experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure at scale (AWS, GCP)
  • Experience with network isolation, high-performance networking, or building egress proxies and policy layers
  • Experience with sandboxes for AI agents, computer use, or reinforcement learning environments
  • Experience with GPU virtualization, accelerators, or performance work on machine learning workloads
  • Prior experience as a technical lead or mentor
Representative projects
  • Cutting sandbox cold start from seconds to milliseconds with snapshot-based restore and pre-warmed pools
  • Designing a network egress policy layer so agents can reach approved services without exposing secrets
  • Running many thousands of parallel reinforcement learning environments with strong isolation between them
  • Building tracing tools that attribute latency and resource use inside a running sandbox
  • Reducing per-sandbox memory overhead to raise density on each host
  • Hardening the runtime against escape attempts found in internal red-team exercises


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-$485,000 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.

About Anthropic

Anthropic is an artificial intelligence research lab that focuses on developing AI systems that are safe, reliable, and trustworthy. The company was founded in 2019 by Dr. Yoshua Bengio, a leading AI researcher and winner of the Turing Award. Anthropic's research is focused on developing AI systems that can learn from small amounts of data, reason about complex systems, and interact with humans in a natural way. The company is based in New York City and has a team of experienced AI researchers and engineers.
Learn more about Anthropic
Size
50 employees
Industry
Founded
2019

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at Anthropic

More Information Technology Jobs

Find similar Software Engineer, Sandboxing jobs: