The Staff Software Engineer on the Developer Productivity team owns the end‑to‑end development environment for Claude, focusing on reducing cold‑start times, designing isolation models, and building pre‑push validation to catch failures locally. This role requires deep experience in backend/infrastructure, container technologies, and cross‑team collaboration, and is responsible for shaping the platform’s repository and service topology as the company scales.
Staff Software Engineer, Developer Productivity (Dev Environments) - Claude Code at Anthropic
Hybrid - San Francisco, CA
More jobs at AnthropicSalary
USD 405,000 - 485,000
Requirements
Skills
- Significant professional software engineering experience in backend or developer infrastructure domains
- Proficiency in Python
- Hands‑on experience with containers (Docker or equivalent), Kubernetes, and pod‑level operations
- Prior ownership of a developer environment, build system, or paved‑path workflow used by a multi‑team engineering organization, with demonstrable adoption
- Experience working across team boundaries to deliver infrastructure that other engineers depend on
- Daily, hands‑on use of AI coding assistants as part of your own development workflow
- 7+ years of backend or developer infrastructure engineering experience
- Experience with Rust or Go
- A track record of reducing cold‑start or boot time on a complex multi‑service stack to under a minute, with before/after measurements
- Prior design of environment isolation models such as ephemerals, sandboxes, or isolated namespaces
- Experience leading (or making the case against) a monorepo extraction, repo split, or comparable scope‑boundary migration from the developer‑tooling side
- Familiarity with Bazel, Buck, Nix, or similar hermetic build systems
- Experience operating as a platform tech lead—broad context across the stack and a history of cross‑team influence
Responsibilities
- Own the local and hosted development environment end to end—container lifecycle, dependency provisioning, hot reload, and the single command an engineer runs to start working
- Drive down cold‑start time for fresh development environments and keep it low as the codebase grows
- Design and implement the environment isolation model (sandboxes, ephemerals, namespace separation) that lets engineers experiment freely without risk to shared systems
- Build and maintain the pre‑push validation surface so failures are caught on the engineer's machine, not in CI
- Partner with platform, delivery infrastructure, and tooling teams to shape the repository and service topology that best supports a fast inner loop
- Act as a technical lead across team boundaries—gathering requirements, building consensus, and advocating for the approach that's right for engineers across Anthropic
Technologies
PythonDockerKubernetesRustGoBazelBuckNixAI coding assistantsDev container image pipelinePre‑push hook framework
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