What are the responsibilities and job description for the Software Engineer, API (Backend) position at Anthropic?
About the role
Anthropic is seeking talented and experienced Software Engineers to join our API team and help build the world's most trusted AI platform for developers. Since launch, the Anthropic API has seen rapid growth and adoption by companies of all sizes to build AI applications with our industry-leading models. The API serves as the primary channel for safely and broadly distributing AI's benefits across all sectors of the economy. You'll work on building and scaling frontier model capabilities while ensuring they're easy to use, safe, and provide a world-class developer experience.
We have two specialized teams that are currently hiring. Team placement occurs after the interview process, taking into account your interests and experience alongside organizational needs:
API Capabilities: You'll work on shipping the world's most intelligent and capable APIs, partnering directly with research to bring frontier capabilities to developers. This team owns core capabilities including vision, tool use, computer use, and prompt caching. Your work will directly impact how developers interact with our most advanced models.
API Knowledge: You'll focus on transforming Claude into a true knowledge worker by ensuring the model has access to and understanding of the right knowledge at the right time. You'll work on making it possible for developers to securely give Claude access to their data while automatically processing and retrieving relevant information. You'll partner directly with research to bring state-of-the-art retrieval advancements to developers.Responsibilities:
- Design and implement products that we launch in the Anthropic API, serving hundreds of thousands of developers
- Partner with research teams to productize cutting-edge model capabilities
- Participate in API design reviews to ensure consistent, intuitive developer experiences
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ship a world-class product
- Support and debug production issues through on-call rotations
- Design processes (e.g. postmortem review, incident response, on-call rotations) that help the team operate effectively and never fail the same way twice
You might be a good fit if you:
- Have 8 years of relevant industry experience, 3 years leading large scale, complex projects or teams as an engineer or tech lead
- Are passionate about designing tasteful APIs and developer-focused products
- Enjoy talking directly with users and view "product" as part of your job
- Can work independently and thrive in a fast-paced environment
- Have deep expertise in distributed systems and API architecture
- Have excellent written and verbal communication skills to build consensus with stakeholders
Technical Stack
- Languages: Python, TypeScript
- Frameworks: FastAPI, React
- Infrastructure: GCP, Kubernetes, Cloud Run
- Databases: PostgreSQL (AlloyDB), Vector Stores
- Tools: Statsig, Prometheus, Grafana
