Staff+ Software Engineer, Auth & Identity
$405k - $485k • San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY
Posted 2d ago
About the job
The Auth & Identity team at Anthropic builds the core authentication, authorization, and identity platform that powers all Anthropic products, including the API, Claude Code, Claude.ai, and enterprise offerings. This platform handles every login, API key, OAuth token, access decision, and organization record. As Claude evolves into an agentic platform, this team is defining the future of identity and access for human users, service accounts, and autonomous agents acting on behalf of users. The role involves owning critical, high-traffic systems end-to-end, from design to iteration, and shaping the technical strategy for identity and access across Anthropic. This includes designing credentials for agents, routing access decisions through a unified authorization system, building a first-class identity model for service accounts and agents, ensuring global distribution and multi-region resilience, and deepening enterprise integrations.
Responsibilities
- Own critical, high-traffic systems end-to-end, from design through rollout, operations, and iteration.
- Shape the technical strategy for identity and access across Anthropic.
- Design credentials for agents and long-running autonomous workloads.
- Route all access decisions through a unified authorization system with low latency and high resilience.
- Build a first-class identity model for service accounts and agents.
- Ensure global distribution and multi-region failover for mission-critical services.
- Deepen enterprise integration, including login policies, recovery methods, and provider integrations.
- Build primitives that are easy for other engineers to adopt correctly, with documentation and self-service.
- Navigate ambiguity and make sound technical decisions independently.
- Communicate clearly with cross-functional partners and stakeholders.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience building and operating backend or platform systems at scale, ideally including identity, authentication, authorization, or security-adjacent infrastructure.
- Experience with OAuth 2.0 and OIDC, SAML, SCIM, JWTs and token exchange, workload identity federation, policy engines (e.g., Cedar, OPA), or RBAC and resource-level access control models.
- Deep care for reliability and security, designing for on-call, failure modes, revocation, and maintainability.
- Comfortable owning large migrations in live, high-traffic systems.
- Product-focused approach to platform work.
- Familiarity with using AI tools in software development workflows.