Staff Software Engineer (Environments Infrastructure)

About the role

• Anthropic’s Environments organization builds and maintains the infrastructure that improves Claude’s capabilities through reinforcement learning • That includes the frameworks researchers use to build environments and the infrastructure responsible for running them • The team’s mission is to productionize research • You’ll embed with research teams, get up to speed on how they work, and design the frameworks and APIs that let them move faster, building systems the team can understand, own, and maintain themselves • Scope also includes keeping production RL runs healthy, maintainable, monitored, and easy to triage • You’ll be a strong fit if you have deep expertise in Python, a refined sense of taste for API and framework design, and good intuition for how complex systems fail, especially silently • It’s a bonus if you’ve built and operated a stateful distributed system, such as a workflow engine, actor framework, or durable-execution runtime, where correctness depends on getting shared state and recovery right • You should be comfortable diving into messy research code, finding the abstractions that matter, and improving them incrementally while researchers continue to build on your work • You should also be comfortable using AI tools to accelerate your own development, but have an impulse towards deep verification • Design widely used APIs, frameworks, and abstractions that other engineers and researchers build on, making correct usage the default and ruling out entire classes of errors structurally • Own the platform layers that sit beneath every environment, including the agent runtime • Build the tooling that lets environment owners understand, debug, and maintain their environments in production without needing an infrastructure engineer in the loop • Embed with research teams on a rotational basis, work directly in their codebases without slowing down the research they support, and transfer ownership when you rotate off • Anticipate silent failure modes and prevent them structurally through type safety, well-designed invariants, targeted testing, and refactors that reduce the room for correctness issues • Drive adoption of new frameworks across the organization, including deprecations and cutovers • Help define the engineering standards, review practices, and design patterns for a new team, and mentor researchers and engineers in adopting them • These are examples of the challenges the team tackles: • Design a base RL environment abstraction that can be subclassed to support the large majority of environments built across RL • Redesign the model-tool interface for sandboxed agentic environments so that state is guaranteed to survive serialization, making it structurally impossible to write a tool that silently loses state • Design the state-sharing and recovery model for multi-agent workloads, so that losing a sandbox partway through a task becomes a transparent resume rather than lost work • Define the failure and retry model for a sandboxed execution platform, distinguishing infrastructure faults from genuine task outcomes so that each is handled correctly • Build the tooling that lets an environment owner diagnose why their environment is unhealthy in a production run, and fix it themselves Benefits • Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents • Inclusive fertility benefits via Carrot Fertility • 22 weeks of paid parental leave • Flexible paid time off and absence policies • Mental health support for you and your dependents • Competitive salary and equity packages • Optional equity donation matching at a 1:1 ratio, up to 25% of your equity grant • Retirement plans with competitive matching • Life and income protection plans • $500/month flexible wellness and time saver stipend • Commuter benefits • Annual education stipend • Home office stipends • Relocation support for those moving for Anthropic • Daily meals and snacks in the office