Staff+ Software Engineer, Privacy

About the role

Anthropic seeks a foundational privacy engineer to integrate data protection directly into our frontier AI systems. You will establish our privacy engineering function, architecting systems that prioritize safety and compliance from the ground up.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Design privacy-preserving architectures for large-scale AI training and inference using methods like differential privacy, federated learning, and secure multi-party computation.
• Collaborate with researchers to implement training techniques that maintain model performance while protecting user data.
• Build infrastructure for automated data discovery, classification, access control, audit logging, and lifecycle management.
• Translate regulatory requirements including GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and the EU AI Act into automated technical controls.
• Create data governance systems to manage lineage, purpose limitation, and retention across distributed AI environments.
• Conduct threat modeling and privacy reviews for new features and models.
• Partner with product and infrastructure teams to embed privacy controls into Claude.
• Develop internal privacy frameworks and toolkits to assist other engineering teams.
• Create analytics systems that provide insights without compromising individual user privacy.
• Evaluate emerging privacy technologies and contribute to industry standards and open-source tooling.

Requirements

• Proven experience applying privacy engineering principles such as data minimization and privacy by design in production.
• Proficiency in Go, Python, or similar languages with a background in operating large-scale production systems.
• Experience building privacy infrastructure for platforms with significant user bases.
• Background in data governance, lifecycle management, or classification systems.
• Technical understanding of GDPR and CCPA compliance.
• Experience with risk assessments, privacy reviews, and threat modeling.
• Strong communication skills to align research, engineering, legal, and product stakeholders.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of training and professional experience.

Nice to have

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including large-scale infrastructure.
• 3+ years of experience as a technical lead on complex, multi-quarter projects.
• Hands-on work with homomorphic encryption, secure enclaves, or other privacy-enhancing technologies.
• Experience building privacy controls specifically for machine learning systems.
• Background as an early hire in a privacy engineering function.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and distributed systems.
• Contributions to privacy research or open-source projects.

Skills & tools

• Python, Go
• Differential Privacy, Federated Learning, Secure Multi-Party Computation, Homomorphic Encryption
• GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, EU AI Act
• Data Governance, Threat Modeling

Practical notes

• Visa sponsorship is available, and the company will make every reasonable effort to support the process if an offer is extended.
• The company maintains a hybrid policy requiring staff to be in the office at least 25% of the time.
• Compensation includes competitive pay, equity donation matching, and generous leave policies.
• Candidates are encouraged to apply even if they do not meet every listed qualification.
• Verify all communications originate from @anthropic.com; the company never requests fees or banking information during the recruitment process.

About the company

Anthropic is an American artificial intelligence public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 2021 with the goal of promoting AI safety. Its flagship product is Claude, a series of large language models. Anthropic was established by former members of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei. Daniela Amodei serves as president and Dario Amodei serves as chief executive officer. The company is privately held but plans to go public. It had an estimated valuation of $965 billion in May 2026, making it the most valuable pure-play AI company in the world. Anthropic focuses on building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The company conducts research across multiple areas including interpretability, alignment, and societal impacts. Its approach emphasizes safety at the frontier of AI capabilities. The public benefit corporation structure allows the company to prioritize long-term safety outcomes alongside commercial objectives. Anthropic works with governments, civil society, and industry partners to promote responsible AI development. The company publishes research papers and shares safety insights with the broader AI community. Its team includes researchers, engineers, and policy experts working on technical and governance challenges. Anthropic aims to ensure that advanced AI systems benefit humanity.