Software Engineer, Sandboxing

About the role

Every time Claude runs code, uses a computer, or works as an agent, it does so inside a sandbox. Our Sandboxing team builds the isolation layer behind that work. The same systems run the code Claude writes for users, the environments we train and evaluate models in, and the agents our customers deploy.

These workloads are untrusted by design, and there are a lot of them. Sandboxes need to start in milliseconds, hold up under adversarial code, and scale to a very large number of concurrent sessions. You will work at the boundary between the Linux kernel, virtualization, and the container ecosystem. You will partner with research, product, and security teams to make sure that safe and fast do not trade off against each other.

Key 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

Minimum qualifications

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

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

Prior experience as a technical lead or mentor

Representative projects

Cutting sandbox cold start from seconds to milliseconds with snapshot-based restore and pre-warmed pools

Designing a network egress policy layer so agents can reach approved services without exposing secrets

Running many thousands of parallel reinforcement learning environments with strong isolation between them

Building tracing tools that attribute latency and resource use inside a running sandbox

Reducing per-sandbox memory overhead to raise density on each host

Hardening the runtime against escape attempts found in internal red-team exercises

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$320,000—$485,000 USD

Logistics

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

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

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.

How we're different

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.