Staff Software Engineer (Code RL)

About this role

• Code RL at Anthropic drives reinforcement learning efforts behind Claude’s coding capabilities, creating and scaling agentic coding environments
• This is an engineering role with unusual latitude to set technical direction and standards
• You’ll be part of a team solving the engineering side of research efforts such as embedding with research teams, getting up to speed on their systems and needs, and designing the frameworks, APIs, and infrastructure that let researchers move faster, then rotating off, leaving behind well-oiled systems those teams can understand, own, and maintain themselves
• Your remit also includes the ongoing health of production RL runs: maintainable, monitored, and straightforward to triage
• The team’s problem space spans the client side of sandboxed execution for agentic RL environments, large-scale data processing jobs, the lifecycle of production datasets, and the frameworks researchers build environments on
• You won’t own all of this yourself, you’ll take on the slices where your depth matters most
• You’ll be a strong fit if you have deep expertise in Python, a refined sense of taste for API and framework design, and hard-won intuition for how complex systems fail — especially silently
• You should be comfortable diving into messy research code, finding the load-bearing abstractions, and improving them incrementally while researchers continue to build on top of your work
• Design widely-used APIs, frameworks, and abstractions that other engineers and researchers build on, with careful attention to interface legibility and principled defaults
• Embed with research teams on a rotational basis: understand their engineering needs, build systems and APIs that support their work, and transfer ownership so teams can maintain those systems after you rotate off
• Work directly in research codebases, improving reliability and structure without slowing down the research they support
• Anticipate silent failure modes and prevent them structurall...