Software Engineer, Model Context Protocol - job 1 of 2
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:
At Anthropic, we're building MCP (Model Context Protocol) as the industry standard for AI context integration. Since its launch in November 2024, developers have created hundreds of integrations, enabling AI models to securely and efficiently connect with external context, tools, and capabilities. As a Software Engineer on the MCP team, you'll help shape the future of AI integrations while working in the open with a vibrant developer community.
About the MCP team:
The MCP team focuses on protocol development, developer experience, and ecosystem growth. Drawing inspiration from successful open source teams, we balance the needs of our internal products with those of the broader developer community. Our team works in public, engaging directly with developers and maintaining high standards for backwards compatibility, security, and performance.
Responsibilities:
- Design and implement core protocol features in collaboration with the open source community
- Build and maintain high-quality SDKs and reference implementations
- Drive technical discussions and decision-making through public RFCs and GitHub issues
- Support both external developers and internal teams building on MCP
- Develop showcase implementations that demonstrate MCP's capabilities
- Write clear, comprehensive technical documentation
- Participate in code reviews and provide mentorship to community contributors
- Help shape the technical direction of the protocol while ensuring backward compatibility
You may be a good fit if you:
- Have 5+ years of software engineering experience
- Have experience contributing to or maintaining open source projects
- Are comfortable working in public and engaging with developer communities
- Have strong technical communication skills, both written and verbal
- Have experience designing and implementing protocols, APIs, or developer platforms
- Are passionate about developer experience and building for other engineers
- Can balance competing needs from various stakeholders while maintaining technical excellence
- Have experience with TypeScript/JavaScript and Python ecosystems
- Care about security, scalability, and backwards compatibility
- Are excited about AI and its potential impact on developer tools
Strong candidates may also:
- Track record of successful open source contributions or project maintenance
- Experience with AI/ML systems or large language models
- Background in developer tools or platform engineering
- Experience with protocol design and versioning
- Public speaking experience at technical conferences
- Experience building and supporting enterprise integrations
Candidates need not have:
- Previous experience with AI systems specifically
- Formal computer science education
- A large open source following or presence
Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
The expected salary range for this position is:
Logistics
Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.
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.
We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.
How we're different
We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.
The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.
Come work with us!
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.
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By
Anthropic
Anthropic is an AI startup public-benefit company dedicated to AI safety and research, aiming to develop dependable, interpretable, and controllable AI systems. The company was was founded by former members of OpenAI in 2021.
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