Software Engineer, Sandboxing
About this role
The Sandboxing team at Anthropic builds the isolation layer that runs every time Claude executes code, uses a computer, or operates as an agent. These systems power the user-facing code environments, model training pipelines, and customer deployments with workloads that are untrusted by design. Engineers in this position work directly at the boundary between the Linux kernel, virtualization, and container ecosystems to ensure that execution speed and security isolation never trade off against each other.
Daily responsibilities involve designing and operating high-throughput sandbox infrastructure that launches in milliseconds while resisting adversarial code. Candidates who thrive in this environment possess strong low-level systems programming abilities, enjoy tackling performance or security challenges at the kernel and hypervisor level, and want to contribute to the safety of large-scale AI deployment.
What you will do
- Design, build, and operate sandboxing infrastructure capable of running untrusted, model-generated code at scale.
- Improve startup times, density, and throughput using snapshotting, restoration, and warm pools.
- Strengthen security isolation across compute, filesystem, and network layers with proper egress controls.
- Investigate and resolve performance, reliability, and security bugs at the kernel, hypervisor, and container runtime levels.
- Build monitoring, tracing, and debugging tools to monitor resource utilization inside active sandboxes.
- Collaborate with research, product, and platform teams to support reinforcement learning environments and reliable product capabilities.
What you need
- Software engineering experience in Linux systems programming, kernel development, or related low-level domains.
- Strong programming skills in a systems language such as Rust, C, C++, or Go.
- Working knowledge of virtualization or container isolation technologies like 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 navigate unfamiliar codebases and ship practical solutions with measurable results.
- Strong communication skills paired with a commitment to building safe, reliable systems.
Nice to have
- Experience building or operating multi-tenant sandbox, serverless, or code execution platforms.
- Experience with microVMs, user-space kernels, or lightweight virtualization.
- Experience with OS-level security hardening such as seccomp and LSMs.
- Experience with eBPF and kernel tracing tools.
- Experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure at scale on AWS or GCP.
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the remote work policy?
Anthropic operates on a location-based hybrid policy where staff are expected to be in one of the offices at least 25% of the time, though some roles may require more in-office presence.
What is the salary range for this role?
The annual base salary range for this position is $320,000 to $485,000 USD.
Does Anthropic sponsor visas?
Yes, visa sponsorship is available, and the company retains an immigration lawyer to assist candidates who receive an offer.