Staff+ Software Engineer, Claude Managed Agents

Anthropic$405K — $485K *
Information Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of backend, distributed systems, or infrastructure engineering experience
  • Proven history of building and operating stateful, long-running, or high-throughput production systems
  • Strong product sense with a focus on API design and developer experience
  • Experience in early-stage environments and navigating ambiguity
  • Familiarity with AI tools like Claude in software development
  • Ability to take ownership of work through all stages: design, build, deployment, and operations

Responsibilities

  • Design and scale the Managed Agents platform for stateful sessions and autonomous execution
  • Evolve the agent harness and create evaluation infrastructure to assess its performance
  • Develop capabilities that enhance what agents can achieve for internal and external customers
  • Create stable, long-lasting APIs that allow for changes in implementation and design
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define the future of managed agents
  • Ensure product reliability, efficiency, and performance in production environments
  • Build systems that foster a great user experience for developers

Benefits

  • Flexible work arrangement with a preference for candidates in specified locations
  • Visa sponsorship available
  • Inclusive hiring practice encouraging diverse applications
  • Opportunity to work on impactful AI systems with ethical considerations
  • Access to public developer platforms and large-scale APIs
Full Job Description
We are looking for experienced backend and distributed systems engineers to join the Agentic Systems team within our Platform organization. Agentic Systems builds Claude Managed Agents: the hosted platform for building, running, and scaling production agents on Claude. Instead of every developer hand-rolling an agent loop, sandboxed execution, state management, credential handling, and error recovery - and reworking all of it with every model release - Managed Agents pairs an Anthropic-built agent harness with production infrastructure for sessions, environments, tools, memory, and permissions, exposed through a small set of composable APIs designed to stay stable as models and harnesses evolve. It powers agentic products inside Anthropic as well as those built by customers on the Claude Platform. Managed Agents is in public beta and growing quickly, and this is still an early team with a lot of surface area left to define. You'll drive 0 1 1 efforts from ideation through GA, own systems end to end from API design through operations, and partner closely with product, research, developer experience, and go-to-market teams to figure out what "managed" should mean for the next generation of agents. You should be comfortable going deep on hard distributed systems problems, care about APIs as a product in their own right, and be motivated by turning ambiguous ideas into high-quality, shipped platform capabilities that other engineers build their products on. What you'll do Scale the platform. Managed Agents runs long-lived, stateful sessions that execute autonomously for minutes or hours/days, persist through disconnections, and resume cleanly - across Anthropic-hosted sandboxes, self-hosted environments on customer infrastructure, and other clouds. You'll design and operate the systems underneath that: durable session and event storage, sandbox orchestration, streaming, scheduling, and multi-tenant isolation. Reliability, latency, and cost efficiency are product features here, and you'll own them in production. Evolve the harness - and prove it with evals. The harness is the loop that calls Claude, routes tool calls, manages context (caching, compaction, memory), and recovers from errors. Harnesses encode assumptions about what the model can't yet do on its own, and those assumptions go stale as models improve. You'll work alongside research to revisit them with each model generation, build the eval infrastructure that measures harness quality against research baselines and real customer workloads, and hold the bar that lets us say our harness gets the most out of Claude. Help builders get the most out of Claude. Our customers - internal and external - are building agents both as products for their users and to transform their own operations. You'll ship the capabilities that raise the ceiling on what those agents can do: outcome-driven execution where developers specify success criteria and a budget and Claude iterates until it gets there, multi-agent orchestration, memory, and the observability and tracing that make long-running agents debuggable. The goal is the highest intelligence per dollar of any agent platform, delivered safely. Design APIs that outlast their implementations. Agents, environments, sessions, vaults, and event streams are interfaces thousands of developers build against and that our own products depend on. You'll shape those primitives - versioning, ergonomics across API, SDK, and CLI, sensible defaults, escape hatches - with the expectation that the implementations underneath will change many times while the contracts hold. You might be a good fit if you: 30 Have a minimum of 8 years of practical experience as a backend, distributed systems, or infrastructure engineer 30 Have built and operated stateful, long-running, or high-throughput systems in production - workflow orchestration, streaming, storage, container or job orchestration - and can reason rigorously about durability, consistency, failure modes, and cost 30 Have strong product sense and treat API design as a craft; you care about the developer on the other side of the interface and can ideate and execute product strategy with cross-functional partners in new domains 30 Are excited by 0 1 1 work and comfortable navigating ambiguity, and have ideally operated in both early-stage and more mature team or company settings 30 Use Claude or other AI tools as a core part of how you build software, and have opinions about what makes an agent harness good 30 Take full ownership of your work - from design through build, deployment, and operations (including on-call), to iterating on and improving what you ship 30 Care about building systems that other engineers and businesses love to use, and about doing so safel Strong candidates may also have: 30 Built or contributed to an agent harness, agent framework, or LLM orchestration layer - tool execution, context management, memory, or multi-agent coordination 30 Worked on an AI or ML platform (model serving, inference infrastructure, developer tooling) at an AI lab or an AI-native product company, or led adoption of AI-driven development inside an engineering organization 30 Built evaluation or benchmarking infrastructure for LLM or agent systems 30 Experience with durable execution or workflow engines, sandboxed code execution, or container runtimes 30 Shipped public developer platforms, APIs, or SDKs used by external developers at scale Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Location Preference: Preference will be given to candidates based in NY, SEA, SF or the Bay Area given the current location of team. 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: $405,000-$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. 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.

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

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