Staff+ Software Engineer, Databases
Anthropic · San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA · Posted Jul 7, 2026
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About Anthropic
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.
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…