Staff+ Software Engineer, Databases

About the role

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