Staff+ Software Engineer, Databases

Anthropic$320K — $485K *
Information Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years experience as a software engineer in database or storage systems
  • Strong understanding of distributed database architectures and OLTP systems
  • Expertise in SQL and a major database engine (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL)
  • Proven history of leading large-scale infrastructure projects
  • Ability to balance speed and reliability in production environments
  • Effective in technical leadership and cross-functional collaboration

Responsibilities

  • Drive the technical strategy for database solutions for Product and Research
  • Design scalable database systems for millions of users
  • Scale database systems to handle significant growth while ensuring reliability
  • Create robust data storage solutions across multi-cloud environments
  • Develop infrastructure for data migration and change capture
  • Design caching infrastructure for high-performance data access
  • Collaborate with teams to understand data needs and enhance workflow

Benefits

  • Visa sponsorship available
  • Hybrid remote work policy requiring in-office presence 25% of the time
  • Opportunity to work on impactful AI systems with diverse perspectives
  • Encouragement for candidates from underrepresented groups to apply
Full Job Description
About the Role

We're looking for experienced engineers to build and scale the database infrastructure that powers Claude's products and Anthropic's research. As a Software Engineer on the Databases team, you'll architect and operate the systems that let millions of users interact with Claude while also supporting frontier AI research workloads.

You'll help set the database strategy for Anthropic: designing systems that handle billions of API requests, building storage that runs cleanly across GCP, AWS, and a range of deployment models, and creating the reliable data layer that lets research move fast.

The Databases team spans three areas: the core database platform (data plane and control plane), data movement (migrations, backfill, and change data capture), and caching. We're hiring across all three.
Key Responsibilities
  • Drive the technical direction for database solutions used across Product and Research
  • Design and implement database solutions that scale to support millions of users across Claude's product ecosystem
  • Build and scale database systems through 100x+ growth while maintaining reliability and performance
  • Build the database platform that lets Anthropic engineers ship without thinking about databases or scaling.
  • Architect data storage solutions that operate across GCP, AWS, first-party deployments, third-party deployments, and other environments
  • Develop database infrastructure that serves both product and research workloads with different performance characteristics
  • Build data movement infrastructure (migration tooling, backfill, and change data capture pipelines) that safely consolidates and moves data across the organization
  • Design and operate caching infrastructure, including CDC-driven cache invalidation, that keeps Anthropic's hottest paths fast and correct
  • Partner with product and research teams to understand data requirements and build infrastructure that accelerates their work
  • Optimize database performance, reliability, and cost efficiency at scale
  • Make build-vs-buy decisions for database technologies
Minimum Qualifications
  • Significant experience as a software engineer building and operating production database or storage systems
  • Deep knowledge of distributed database architectures and OLTP systems at scale
  • Proficiency with SQL and at least one major relational or distributed database engine (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, Spanner, CockroachDB, DynamoDB)
  • Track record of leading large, complex infrastructure projects as an engineer or tech lead
  • Ability to balance moving quickly with the reliability needs of production systems
  • Strong technical leadership and cross-functional collaboration skills
Preferred Qualifications
  • 10+ years building and scaling database systems, with 3+ years leading large-scale projects or teams
  • Experience scaling databases through periods of rapid growth at high-growth companies
  • Experience operating Spanner, CockroachDB, TiDB, AlloyDB, or other globally distributed SQL databases in production
  • Experience with Redis, Temporal, vector databases, or async job processing frameworks
  • Experience with change data capture (Debezium or similar), large-scale data migration, or streaming data infrastructure
  • Experience building multi-cloud or hybrid cloud database solutions
  • Knowledge of database orchestration and automation at scale
  • Contributions to database internals, storage engines, or related open source projects

Note: Prior AI/ML infrastructure experience is not required. We value deep infrastructure and database expertise from any domain.

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.

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.

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 [redacted].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.

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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