Staff+ Software Engineer, Databases

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 …