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