Engineering Manager, Connectivity - London

About the company: the company’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: Our mission on the Connectivity team is to make Claude the most connected AI. As agents take on more real‑world work, we’re taking a leading role in defining how they get access to external systems — safely, with the right permissions, and in ways enterprises can trust. We ship for claude.ai, Claude Code, Cowork, and the API. We own the MCP proxy that routes every tool call and the OAuth and token management that keeps connections authenticated. We’re also core contributors to the MCP spec — now an open standard under the Linux Foundation — and maintain the official Python and TypeScript SDKs. We’re looking for an experienced engineering leader to lead a team of Connectivity engineers based in London. The Connectivity team spans San Francisco and London, and you’ll work closely with engineering leadership and partner teams in San Francisco to set direction and deliver together across both sites. You’ll lead a team working on problems where reliability and enterprise trust are the bar: token refresh at scale, admin controls that let IT govern what agents can do, and proxy infrastructure that stays up when partner servers don’t.

Key responsibilities:

• Lead a team of engineers building the connectivity infrastructure that powers tool use across the company's product suite, from the MCP proxy to OAuth and token management.
• Take an inclusive, equitable approach to hiring and coaching top technical talent, and maintain a high‑performing team.
• Coach, mentor, and provide career development guidance to your direct reports, helping them set and achieve their professional goals.
• Partner with Connectivity engineering leadership in San Francisco, along with product, security, and platform teams, to define the team's roadmap and create clarity for the team in an ambiguous and evolving environment.
• Drive cross‑team and cross‑org alignment to ship work that spans claude.ai, Claude Code, Cowork, and the API, working effectively with teams primarily based in the US.
• Establish and drive adoption of engineering best practices within your team, including the operational rigor (on‑call, incident response, postmortems) required for infrastructure that other teams and external partners depend on.
• Contribute to engineering‑wide initiatives as a member of the company's engineering management team.

Minimum qualifications:

• Experience managing software engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, and performance management.
• A technical background in backend or platform engineering, with the depth to guide architectural decisions and engage credibly in technical discussions.
• Experience operating production distributed systems, with an understanding of what reliability, observability, and incident response require at scale.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to build consensus across teams and time zones.
• Demonstrated success building a culture of belonging, and of product and engineering excellence.

Preferred qualifications:

• 3+ years of experience as an engineering manager.
• Familiarity with MCP or experience contributing to open standards or open source ecosystems.
• Experience leading teams that collaborate closely with distributed or cross‑timezone partner teams.
• Familiarity with authentication and authorization concepts such as OAuth, token management, or identity systems.
• Experience building or operating API gateways, proxies, or multi‑tenant platforms.
• Experience building for enterprise customers, including admin controls, governance, and compliance requirements.
• Experience working on AI/ML products or agentic systems.

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: £1—£1 GBP.

Logistics:

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.
• Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.
• Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position.
• 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.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that the company recruiters only contact you from @the company.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of the company. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate the company recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit the company.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

How we’re different:

We believe that the highest‑impact AI research will be big science. At the company 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.