Staff Software Engineer, Finance Engineering

About the role

Every dollar Anthropic earns and every dollar it spends on compute has to reach the books correctly, and the volume grows with Claude usage. That data comes from across the company and from partners: usage and billing, compute, infrastructure assets, leases. Products and pricing models keep launching, and each one adds another path into the books. Our goal is a continuous close with zero material issues, with audit-grade controls.

You’ll build the platform that gets us there: one front door for every finance event, an append-only ledger, and an accounting engine that posts each event exactly once. This is a distributed systems problem with an unusually high correctness bar. The system has to be right to the cent, replay cleanly and explain any number as of any date, at that volume. You will shape its architecture. Its users include Claude agents, which read and write through the same APIs and controls as people.

You’ll work closely with SWEs in Billing, Compute and Infra on shared contracts and APIs, and with product owners, finance operations and internal audit to turn accounting and controls requirements into designs. You don’t need a finance background. If you have built backend systems where correctness matters, we will teach you the domain.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the front door into finance and its governed contracts: APIs for apps and agents, an event bus for systems that publish, adapters for vendor apps and reports, data-quality gates, and processing that posts every event exactly once, with replay and backfill
• Drive the build of the accounting ledger and engine: an append-only ledger with idempotent posting, a rules framework that turns business events into journal entries, translation into the ERP, and period locks
• Design and build the SDKs and frameworks that finance apps and agents build on
• Build controls into the platform as code: immutable audit trail, maker-checker, scoped access and segregation of duties
• Build and run the production services that other engineering teams call in real time, such as the tax and collections services in the billing flow, and own their reliability: uptime, latency, throughput and correctness targets agreed with those teams
• Shape the platform’s technical direction: architecture, engineering standards and design reviews

Minimum qualifications

• Strong backend engineering in a statically typed language such as Go, Java or Rust, or Python at scale
• Experience designing and running high-volume, event-driven systems (publish/subscribe, streaming) with idempotent processing, replay and backfill
• Experience designing relational data models and writing SQL for complex, versioned data
• Experience designing APIs, SDKs and service-to-service integrations used by other teams
• Experience building systems with auditability, access control or compliance requirements
• Experience turning requirements from non-engineering partners into technical designs
• Strong written and verbal communication, including design docs

Preferred qualifications

• 10+ years of experience
• Experience building developer platforms or paved paths
• Experience with streaming systems such as Pub/Sub or Kafka
• Experience building with LLMs and agents, including MCP
• Built a ledger, sub-ledger, billing or payments system
• Familiarity with accounting concepts: double-entry, journal entries
• Familiarity with internal controls and audit concepts: audit trails, segregation of duties, change management
• Exposure to ERP or financial systems, such as Workday Financials