Staff Software Engineer, Code RL

Overview

Staff Software Engineer focused on reinforcement learning efforts behind Claude’s coding capabilities, including building and operating agentic coding environments and production RL runs.

What you'll do

• Design widely-used APIs, frameworks, and abstractions for other engineers and researchers.
• Embed with research teams on a rotational basis and transfer ownership for maintainability after you rotate off.
• Improve reliability and structure in research codebases supporting engineering-side research efforts.
• Prevent silent failure modes using type safety, invariants, targeted testing, and refactors.
• Contribute to production RL reliability with monitoring, regression detection, and triage tooling.
• Define engineering standards, review practices, and design patterns for a new team; mentor others in adopting them.

What you'll need

• Deep expertise in Python, including static typing and safe async/concurrency patterns.
• Experience designing intuitive, safe APIs or frameworks adopted by other engineers/teams.
• Ability to work productively in large, evolving, or research-style codebases not originally authored by you.
• Demonstrated ability to anticipate failure modes (especially silent ones) and prevent them via system design, type safety, and testing.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including explaining designs to collaborators with varied backgrounds.
• Comfort with ambiguity to scope work from a loosely defined problem to a maintainable outcome.

Details

• Annual compensation range: $405,000–$625,000 USD.
• 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 shown through coursework, training, or professional experience.
• Hybrid policy: expect staff to be in an office at least 25% of the time.
• Visa sponsorship: available with an offer; not guaranteed for every role/candidate.