Staff+ Software Engineer, Safeguards Data

About the role

Claude serves millions of individual users alongside enterprise clients. Safeguards Engineering develops the foundational infrastructure that ensures its safe use: robust access controls, active abuse detection, real-time probes and classifiers within the inference pipeline, offline monitoring for review, and the underlying systems powering it all. Operating at scale and velocity, we continuously adapt to technology whose capabilities and risks evolve weekly.

The Safeguards Data team owns the data lifecycle for Safeguards—routing user data and safety metadata from online systems into offline storage and enabling access for downstream teams. Our goal is to provide privacy-safe access to sensitive data for approved uses while ensuring performance, reliability, and minimal blast radius. We prioritize security by design, embedding controls directly into systems operating across AWS, GCP, Azure, and customer-managed environments.

This is a systems engineering position within a small, newly established team. Rather than managing an existing backlog, you will have the autonomy to own a problem domain, establish its technical vision, and shape the team's trajectory.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the stores, pipelines, schemas, and APIs that Safeguards' detection, evaluation, investigation, and review systems read from.
• Build privacy-safe interfaces that allow ML training, evaluation, and investigation workflows to utilize sensitive data without requiring broad access to raw records, ensuring access is tied to purpose and built-in lineage.
• Scale the distributed storage, ingestion, and processing systems operated by Safeguards, maintaining cost efficiency, reliability, and portability across deployment environments.
• Collaborate with investigators, researchers, legal, privacy, and security teams to translate operational requirements into functional mechanisms and systems for safe data utilization.
• Uphold a high operational bar by participating in the on-call rotation, leading incident reviews, and continuously reducing manual operational overhead.
• Lead through technical design by authoring foundational proposals and conducting cross-team architectural reviews.

Minimum qualifications

• Have strong systems fundamentals (processes, threads, RPC, storage, and how systems fail) and have built and operated large-scale, fault-tolerant distributed systems
• Have built and operated systems that handle sensitive or high-value data, with access, privacy, retention and security controls designed in from the start
• Have a track record of building platforms or internal tooling that other teams widely adopt
• Have led the technical design of projects that span several engineers or teams
• Learn quickly and adapt: you're comfortable with ambiguity, a fast pace, and systems or languages you haven't used before
• Care about the impact of your work and about making AI safe, use good judgment about what matters most, and can explain technical trade-offs to non-technical partners

Preferred qualifications

• Proficiency in one or more systems languages (e.g., C, C++, Rust, Go)
• 8+ years of experience as a software engineer, and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or comparable professional experience
• Experience building data infrastructure for ML: training datasets, offline batch inference or evaluation
• Experience with data governance requirements in a regulated or high-sensitivity domain
• Fluency with agentic coding tools such as Claude Code

Annual Salary

$320,000 — $485,000 USD