Software Engineer, Sandboxing
San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY · San Francisco · USD 320,000-485,000 / year · Hybrid · Posted Oct 1, 2026
At a glance
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY · San Francisco
- Salary
- USD 320,000-485,000 / year · Base salary
- Visa sponsorship
- Visa sponsorship available
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
- Every time Claude runs code, uses a computer, or works as an agent, it does so inside a sandbox built by the Sandboxing team.
- The role involves building the isolation layer that runs untrusted, model-generated code, training environments, and customer-deployed agents.
- You will work at the boundary between the Linux kernel, virtualization, and the container ecosystem to ensure safe and fast systems.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate the sandboxing infrastructure that runs untrusted, model-generated code and agent workloads at scale
- Improve sandbox startup time, density, and throughput, including snapshot and restore, checkpointing, and warm pools
- Strengthen isolation across compute, filesystem, and network, including egress controls and per-session credential handling
- Investigate and fix performance, reliability, and security issues at the kernel, hypervisor, and container runtime level
- Build the monitoring, tracing, and debugging tools that show where time and resources go inside a sandbox
- Work with researchers to support reinforcement learning environments and evaluations that need fast, reproducible, isolated execution
- Work with product and platform engineers to expose sandboxes as a dependable, well-designed capability for Claude products and customers
- Partner with security teams to threat-model the platform and to test, harden, and respond to escape and abuse scenarios
- Work with cloud providers on the hardware and platform features that our workloads depend on
- Share knowledge on systems programming and Linux internals, and help set technical standards for the team
Requirements
- Software engineering experience in Linux systems programming, kernel development, or another low-level area
- Strong programming skills in at least one systems language such as Rust, C, C++, or Go
- Working knowledge of virtualization or container isolation technologies such as KVM, QEMU, Firecracker, gVisor, or runc
- Understanding of Linux resource management, including namespaces, cgroups, scheduling, and memory management
- Experience profiling and debugging performance issues at the system level
- Ability to work in unfamiliar codebases and technical areas, and to ship practical solutions with measurable results
- Strong communication skills and a commitment to building safe, reliable systems
- Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
- Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
Preferred qualifications
- Experience building or operating a multi-tenant sandbox, serverless, or code execution platform
- Experience with microVMs, user-space kernels, or lightweight virtualization, including snapshot and restore
- Experience with OS-level security hardening, including seccomp, LSMs, and threat modeling of untrusted code
- Experience with eBPF and kernel tracing tools
- Experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure at scale (AWS, GCP)
- Experience with network isolation, high-performance networking, or building egress proxies and policy layers
- Experience with sandboxes for AI agents, computer use, or reinforcement learning environments
- Experience with GPU virtualization, accelerators, or performance work on machine learning workloads
Benefits
- Competitive compensation and benefits
- Optional equity donation matching
- Generous vacation
- Parental leave
- Flexible working hours
Workplace
- Location-based hybrid policy expecting staff to be in one of the offices at least 25% of the time
Skills
- Rust
- C
- C++
- Go
- KVM
- QEMU
- Firecracker
- gVisor
- Runc
- Kubernetes
- AWS
- GCP
Show all 13 skills
- eBPF