Staff Software Engineer, Environments Infrastructure

About the role

Anthropic’s Environments organization builds the infrastructure that powers reinforcement‑learning research for Claude. As a Staff Software Engineer you will design the APIs, frameworks, and platform layers that let researchers create and run environments at scale, while ensuring reliability and maintainability.

Key responsibilities

• Design widely used APIs, frameworks, and abstractions that make correct usage the default and eliminate whole classes of errors.
• Own the platform layers beneath every environment, including the agent runtime.
• Build tooling that enables environment owners to debug, monitor, and maintain production environments without needing an infrastructure engineer.
• Embed with research teams on a rotational basis, work directly in their codebases, and transfer ownership when rotating off.
• Anticipate silent failure modes and prevent them through type safety, well‑designed invariants, targeted testing, and refactors.
• Drive adoption of new frameworks across the organization, managing deprecations and cutovers.
• Help define engineering standards, review practices, and design patterns for the team, mentoring researchers and engineers in their adoption.

Required profile

• Deep expertise in Python, including static typing, safe async and concurrency patterns, and writing performant code.
• Strong sense of API and framework design.
• Ability to dive into messy research code, extract useful abstractions, and improve them incrementally.
• Comfort using AI tools to accelerate development while maintaining rigorous verification.

Required skills

• Python
• Static typing
• Asynchronous programming
• Concurrency patterns
• API design
• Framework design
• Distributed systems concepts (workflow engine, actor framework, durable‑execution runtime)
• Testing and type safety