Staff+ Software Engineer, Platform Connectivity - Sponsorship Available

About the hiring employer the hiring employer’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 Our mission on the Connectivity team is to make Claude the most connected AI. As agents take on more real-world work, we're taking a leading role in defining how they get access to external systems — safely, with the right permissions, and in ways enterprises can trust. We ship standards and services used by claude.ai, Claude Code, Cowork, and the API. We own the MCP proxy that routes every tool call and the OAuth and token management that keeps connections authenticated. We're also core contributors to the MCP spec — now an open standard under the Linux Foundation — and maintain the official Python and TypeScript SDKs. We're looking for experienced software engineers to join Connectivity. The team spans San Francisco and London, and you'll work closely with partner teams across the hiring employer to deliver impact across all of our products. You'll work on problems where reliability and enterprise trust are critical. This means OAuth at scale, admin controls that let IT govern what agents can do, and proxy infrastructure that is reliable by default. What you'll do You'll design, build, and operate the core connectivity infrastructure behind external tool calls — the MCP proxy and the OAuth and token management systems that keep connections authenticated. You'll own reliability for infrastructure that other teams and external partners depend on, including SLOs, on-call, incident response, and postmortems. You'll build the admin controls and permission models that let enterprise IT govern what agents can do, and contribute to the MCP standard and its ecosystem, including the spec and the official Python and TypeScript SDKs. You'll turn ambiguous outcomes into shipped, scoped work, dogfooding what you build in the products that consume it. You'll independently scope complex, multi-month projects, drive cross-org alignment through ambiguous problem spaces, and make architectural decisions that shape how the hiring employer builds and scales its products. You'll partner directly with research to productize cutting-edge capabilities, and will have lasting impact on the platform that hundreds of thousands of companies and internal/external engineers depend on every day. You might be a good fit if you: Experience as a backend or platform engineer Familiarity with using AI tools as part of the software development process Take a product-focused approach to platform work and care about building solutions that are robust, scalable, and easy to use Take full ownership of your work — from design through build, deployment, and operations, to iterating on and improving your product Can navigate ambiguity and make sound technical decisions independently, and have ideally operated in both 0 → 1 and more mature team or company settings Experience operating production distributed systems, with an understanding of what reliability, observability, and incident response require at scale Excellent communication skills, with the ability to build consensus across teams and time zones Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Location Preference: Preference will be given to candidates based in NY, SEA, SF or the Bay Area given the current location of team. The annual compensation range for this role is listed below. For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role. Annual Salary: $405,000 — $485,000 USD Logistics Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices. Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this. We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team. Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that the hiring employer recruiters only contact you from @the hiring employer.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of the hiring employer. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate the hiring employer recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit the hiring employer.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings. How we're different We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills. The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to the hiring employer, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences. Come work with us! the hiring employer is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.