Staff+ Software Engineer, Databases

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><h2><strong>About Anthropic</strong></h2> <p>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.</p></div><h2>About the Role</h2> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <h2>Key Responsibilities</h2> <ul> <li>Drive the technical direction for database solutions used across Product and Research</li> <li>Design and implement database solutions that scale to support millions of users across Claude's product ecosystem</li> <li>Build and scale database systems through 100x+ growth while maintaining reliability and performance</li> <li>Build the database platform that lets Anthropic engineers ship without thinking about databases or scaling.</li> <li>Architect data storage solutions that operate across GCP, AWS, first-party deployments, third-party deployments, and other environments</li> <li>Develop database infrastructure that serves both product and research workloads with different performance characteristics</li> <li>Build data movement infrastructure (migration tooling, backfill, and change data capture pipelines) that safely consolidates and moves data across the organization</li> <li>Design and operate caching infrastructure, including CDC-driven cache invalidation, that keeps Anthropic's hottest paths fast and correct</li> <li>Partner with product and research teams to understand data requirements and build infrastructure that accelerates their work</li> <li>Optimize database performance, reliability, and cost efficiency at scale</li> <li>Make build-vs-buy decisions for database technologies</li> </ul> <h2>Minimum Qualifications</h2> <ul> <li>Significant experience as a software engineer building and operating production database or storage systems</li> <li>Deep knowledge of distributed database architectures and OLTP systems at scale</li> <li>Proficiency with SQL and at least one major relational or distributed database engine (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, Spanner, CockroachDB, DynamoDB)</li> <li>Track record of leading large, complex infrastructure projects as an engineer or tech lead</li> <li>Ability to balance moving quickly with the reliability needs of production systems</li> <li>Strong technical leadership and cross-functional collaboration skills</li> </ul> <h2>Preferred Qualifications</h2> <ul> <li>10+ years building and scaling database systems, with 3+ years leading large-scale projects or teams</li> <li>Experience scaling databases through periods of rapid growth at high-growth companies</li> <li>Experience operating Spanner, CockroachDB, TiDB, AlloyDB, or other globally distributed SQL databases in production</li> <li>Experience with Redis, Temporal, vector databases, or async job processing frameworks</li> <li>Experience with change data capture (Debezium or similar), large-scale data migration, or streaming data infrastructure</li> <li>Experience building multi-cloud or hybrid cloud database solutions</li> <li>Knowledge of database orchestration and automation at scale</li> <li>Contributions to database internals, storage engines, or related open source projects</li> </ul> <p><em>Note: Prior AI/ML infrastructure experience is not required. We value deep infrastructure and database expertise from any domain.</em></p> <p><strong><em>Deadline to apply:</em></strong><em> None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.</em></p><div class="content-pay-transparency"><div class="pay-input"><div class="description"><p>The annual compensation range for this role is listed below. </p> <p>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.</p></div><div class="title">Annual Salary:</div><div class="pay-range"><span>$320,000</span><span class="divider">—</span><span>$485,000 USD</span></div></div></div><div class="content-conclusion"><h2><strong>Logistics</strong></h2> <p><strong>Minimum education: </strong>Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience</p> <p><strong>Required field of…