Anthropic

AI

SoftwareEngineer,Systems

$320–485k San Francisco, California, United States
Market Sentiment
HIGH DEMAND

Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Senior candidates.

The Brief

“Software Engineer, Systems at Anthropic. Skills: systems programming, runtime development, performance optimization, low-level systems work. Design, build, and optimize core systems inside Bun and Claude Code—runtime internals, I/O paths, memory management, and the agent execution loop. Drive down memory usage, latency, and startup time across Claude Code and the Bun runtime”

What You'll Achieve.

push the performance and reliability of Claude Code and the JavaScript runtime; making everything faster, leaner, and more reliable; Drive down memory usage, latency, and startup time

Industry & Context.

AI
Problems you'll solve

Dig into performance problems across the stack: profiling, tracing, and fixing issues anywhere from the kernel interface up through the JS engine to the agent layer

Eligibility Requirements

Visa sponsorship available, but not guaranteed for every role/candidate, Expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time

What They're Looking For.

Must Have

background in C and/or C++ and Rust, deep systems programming experience: syscalls, Linux internals, I/O (kqueue, epoll, io_uring), manual memory management, and performance engineering, worked on language runtimes, virtual machines, compilers, or JS engines like JavaScriptCore or SpiderMonkey, 5+ years of work experience

Nice to Have

Zig also welcome

What You'll Do.

and optimize core systems inside Bun and Claude Code—runtime internals

and the agent execution loop

Drive down memory usage

and startup time across Claude Code and the Bun runtime

Dig into performance problems across the stack: profiling

and fixing issues anywhere from the kernel interface up through the JS engine to the agent layer

Contribute to the Bun runtime and toolkit

which underpins Claude Code

and other internal Labs products

Stay ahead of advancements in runtimes

and AI-assisted tooling—experimenting

and bringing the best ideas into our stack

How You'll Work.

Team & Collaboration

Collaborate with researchers and product engineers to make sure model capabilities translate into a fast, reliable developer experience; work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts; extremely collaborative group; host frequent research discussions

Communication Scope

communication skills

Full Job Description

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. At Anthropic, we believe new AI capabilities are best achieved through secure foundations, not in spite of them. As capabilities grow more advanced, it is critical that progress moves forward safely and for the benefit of all society. It is the reason why security sits at the center of our work, and not as an afterthought. We're looking for a systems-oriented Software Engineer to push the performance and reliability of Claude Code and the JavaScript runtime that powers it. Claude Code is our terminal-first, agentic coding tool, and a huge part of what makes it fast—and what lets us ship quickly—is Bun. This role sits at that intersection: you'll work deep in the runtime, the kernel interfaces it sits on top of, and the agent loop on top of it, making everything faster, leaner, and more reliable. Your work will also flow through to the Claude Code Agent SDK, Cowork, and other Labs projects that build on the same foundations. This is low-level work. We're looking for someone who has spent years writing production C, C++ and Rust, who thinks in syscalls and allocators, and who gets excited about shaving microseconds and megabytes off hot paths. Responsibilities Design, build, and optimize core systems inside Bun and Claude Code—runtime internals, I/O paths, memory management, and the agent execution loop Drive down memory usage, latency, and startup time across Claude Code and the Bun runtime Dig into performance problems across the stack: profiling, tracing, and fixing issues anywhere from the kernel interface up through the JS engine to the agent layer Collaborate with researchers and product engineers to make sure model capabilities t

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