Staff+ Software Engineer, Databases

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

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.

What it asks for · 6

• 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

Also a plus

• 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

What the job covers

• 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

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• database24×
• data12×
• infrastructure9×
• experience7×
• systems7×
• research6×
• scale6×
• build5×
• engineer5×
• product5×
• building4×
• storage4×
• change data3×
• claude3×
• data capture3×
• database solutions3×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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