Software Engineer, Desktop

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

We're looking for desktop app engineers to join our Claude product team and help build native applications that harness the transformative power of advanced language models. Your mission will be to package our AI capabilities into elegant desktop experiences that put unprecedented capabilities at users' fingertips. You will work with a talented team of engineers, researchers, and product specialists to design and implement key components that bridge our AI technology with intuitive user interfaces. Join us in this exciting mission to transform how people engage with our AI technology and unlock new realms of human potential.

Today, our app is mostly web-based – but we’re eager to build the best possible version of Claude for macOS and Windows with a mix of both native and web technologies. You might be a great fit for this role if you’re up for the challenge of learning multiple programming languages.

We are more interested in strong engineers excited to learn new languages and technologies to build the best possible experience than we are looking for people with hands-on experience in Chromium, Electron, C++, or the various native macOS and Windows APIs. We believe that strong engineers can learn whatever technology is best suited to build the best possible experience – and we understand that even the best engineers will have little experience with one of the operating systems and areas we’d like to invest in. 

We’re looking for curious engineers excited to figure out, with us, what AI on the desktop could do.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and maintain the core infrastructure and features within Claude.ai and in our Electron-based desktop app using a typical web stack (TypeScript, React)


• Use native code (Rust, Swift, C++) to bring advanced features to the desktop app, connecting Claude to macOS and Windows


• Optimize application performance, memory usage, and startup time across platforms


• Design and build robust update mechanisms and deployment pipelines


• Create monitoring tools to track application performance and user experience


• Build a strong intuition for how advanced LLMs could be most useful on your computer, augmenting humans in their work

You may be a good fit if you have:

• Have 5+ years of experience as a software engineer, with strong emphasis on desktop application development


• Have practical experience with Electron and deep understanding of its architecture


• Possess strong JavaScript/TypeScript skills and experience with modern frontend frameworks


• Take a product-focused approach and care about building solutions that are robust, scalable, and easy to use


• Have experience with native module development in C++ to extend application capabilities


• Understand macOS and/or Windows platform-specific technologies and development patterns


• Have experience with cross-platform application packaging, code signing, and distribution


• Thrive in a fast-paced, collaborative environment and enjoy working closely with cross-functional teams

We’re working with a large number of technologies - and you might be an excellent candidate even if you’ve only worked with a subset of them. An ideal candidate may have never used Electron before but does have hands-on experience in working with Chromium’s C++. Similarly, a great candidate may have worked on Electron apps, but hasn’t used C++ or Swift before.

We understand that even the best engineers will have more experience with some platforms than others.

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

• Experience working on and building operating systems, browsers, or deeply OS-integrated software (screensharing, video-calling, game engines, etc)


• Experience integrating and working with AI/ML models and understanding their capabilities


• Demonstrated success implementing cross-platform development strategies


• Vision for the future of AI-powered desktop applications and a drive to make that vision a reality


• Have experience with IPC (Inter-Process Communication) and security in desktop applications

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. 

The expected base compensation for this position is below. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation.

Annual Salary:

$320,000 - $405,000 USD

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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.

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