Staff Software Engineer (Developer Productivity (Development Environments), Claude Code)

About this role

• Every minute an Anthropic engineer or researcher spends waiting on a container to boot, a dependency to resolve, or CI to surface a failure that could have been caught locally is a minute not spent on frontier AI safety
• The Developer Productivity team owns the inner development loop for the people building Claude — and increasingly, for Claude itself as an engineering collaborator
• We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to own our development environment end to end
• You’ll make spinning up a fresh environment fast, design the isolation boundary that keeps local experimentation safely separated from shared research and production infrastructure, and build the pre-push validation layer that catches problems before they ever reach CI
• You’ll also help shape how our repository and platform topology evolves as the company scales, partnering closely with the infrastructure teams who own the substrate you build on
• This team works the way it expects the rest of Anthropic to work: with Claude in the loop
• Agentic coding is both how we operate day to day and a core part of what these environments need to support, so we’re looking for someone who already builds this way and has informed opinions about where the leverage actually is
• Own the local and hosted development environment end to end — container lifecycle, dependency provisioning, hot reload, and the single command an engineer runs to start working
• Drive down cold-start time for fresh development environments and keep it low as the codebase grows
• Design and implement the environment isolation model (sandboxes, ephemeral environments, namespace separation) that lets engineers experiment freely without risk to shared systems
• Build and maintain the pre-push validation surface so failures are caught on the engineer’s machine, not in CI
• Partner with platform, delivery infrastructure, and tooling teams to shape the repository and service topology that best supports a fast inner loop
• Act as a technic...