Software Engineer, Labs

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 the role

At Anthropic, we’re building AI systems that are safe, beneficial, and transformative. Our mission is to develop AI that benefits humanity, and we believe the most powerful capabilities emerge when we thoughtfully bridge the gap between research breakthroughs and real-world applications. Anthropic Labs serves as our internal accelerator. We’re looking for the next breakout hits that bring substantial revenue or transform an industry. We operate in close partnership with research and build through fast iteration cycles. Past successes include Claude Code and MCP. We’re seeking versatile, entrepreneurial engineers to join Labs. In this role, you’ll work at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world application, rapidly building and testing new experiences, working directly with researchers and users, and generating the insights that shape Anthropic’s product future. You’ll need to be comfortable with ambiguity, willing to kill your own projects when the data says to, and energized by the pace of building in uncharted territory.

Key Responsibilities

• Rapidly prototype full-stack applications that showcase emerging AI capabilities, shipping early and often to maximize learning
• Collaborate closely with research teams to understand new model capabilities and translate them into intuitive user experiences
• Work directly with internal test users and external partners to gather feedback, iterate quickly, and validate (or invalidate) product concepts
• Design and run structured experiments to test hypotheses, balancing creative exploration with rigorous evaluation
• Generate documentation and insights to guide successful prototypes toward full product teams
• Advocate for user experience and product considerations early in the research process
• Provide feedback to research teams about model effectiveness and where capabilities can be improved
• Flexibly contribute across Labs initiatives based on organizational priorities and emerging opportunities—context from one project should inform the next

Requirements

• Have 8+ years of experience building full-stack applications, with a track record of zero-to-one work in startup or startup-like environments
• Thrive in ambiguity and are energized (not anxious) by uncertainty—you’re comfortable working on projects that might not exist in three months
• Have a hacker mentality: high agency, bias toward shipping, comfort with technical debt when it’s the right tradeoff
• Are deeply user-centric—you validate ideas with actual users before over-investing and talk about problems before solutions
• Can articulate learnings from failed or killed projects without defensiveness