Software Engineer, Agent SDK - Claude Code
Anthropic
About Anthropic
Anthropic’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 Anthropic
Anthropic'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.
The Role
The Claude Agent SDK is the foundational layer that powers autonomous AI agents — giving developers access to the same tools, agent loop, and context management that power Claude Code, programmable in Python and TypeScript. It's what enables agents to read files, run commands, search the web, edit code, and more, out of the box.
We're looking for a Software Engineer to own and lead the Agent SDK. This is a high-ownership, high-autonomy role: you'll set the technical direction for the SDK, be opinionated about its API design and developer experience, and be the connective tissue between internal teams building next-generation experiences (Claude Desktop, Cowork, IDE extensions) and external developers building production agents on top of Claude.
You'll need to exercise taste and judgment about what to build — balancing a rich stream of requests from internal stakeholders and external customers against a clear product vision for what a great agentic SDK should be.
Responsibilities
- Own the roadmap and technical direction for the Claude Agent SDK (Python and TypeScript)
- Design clean, intuitive APIs that make it easy to build powerful, reliable agents
- Partner closely with internal teams building on Agent SDK — including Claude Desktop, Cowork, and IDE extensions — to understand their needs and prioritize accordingly
- Engage directly with external developers to understand how they're using the SDK, where they're hitting friction, and what unlocks the next generation of use cases
- Raise the quality bar on documentation, examples, and the overall developer experience
- Collaborate with other Claude Code engineers to expose new model capabilities through clean SDK abstractions
You may be a good fit if you
- Have strong opinions about what great developer tools look like, grounded in experience building or using them
- Are energized by owning something end-to-end, from API design through docs through developer adoption
- Have experience designing and shipping developer-facing SDKs or APIs, and have felt the difference between an SDK that developers love and one they merely tolerate
- Are excited about the frontier of agentic AI — agents that can reason, plan, and act autonomously
- Have hands-on experience with agentic patterns: tool use, orchestration, context management, multi-step reasoning
- Can operate independently in ambiguous environments and push projects forward without waiting for direction
- Care about the societal implications of the technology you build
- Have 5+ years of software engineering experience
Strong candidates may also have
- Maintained a project built on the Claude Agent SDK
- Experience managing an open source project on GitHub — triaging issues, prioritizing what to take on and engaging with community contributors
- Experience scaling TypeScript or Python library codebases
- Shipped SDKs or APIs used by external developers in production
- Opinions about API versioning, backwards compatibility, and managing ecosystem migrations
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.
Logistics
Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.
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 Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic 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 anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.
How we're different
We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic 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 Anthropic, 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!
Anthropic 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