# Katelyn Lesse Head of Platform Engineering at Anthropic, leading the Claude Developer Platform — APIs, SDKs, documentation, and console. Previously Head of Engineering at Stripe and Senior Director of Engineering at Betterment. Princeton alumna based in San Francisco. ## Known For - Leading the Claude Developer Platform and its evolution toward agentic workloads - Model Context Protocol (MCP) — open standard for connecting AI to external systems - Advocacy for "unhobbled" agents with computer access, code execution, and memory - Quoted on Anthropic's ~$300M acquisition of Stainless (May 2026): "Agents are only as useful as what they can connect to." ## Career | Period | Role | Company | |--------|------|---------| | 2023– | Head of Platform Engineering | Anthropic | | ~2019–2023 | Head of Engineering | Stripe | | ~2016–2019 | Senior Director of Engineering | Betterment | ## Recent Activity ### May 2026 - Quoted in Anthropic's acquisition of Stainless (~$300M), the SDK/MCP-server startup behind all official Claude API libraries - Posted on X about the Anthropic SDK agent tool loop for building with Claude's tool-calling - Participated in Anthropic's 2026 Developer Conference alongside Angela Jiang (head of product, Claude Platform) ### November 2025 - Speaker at AI Engineering Code Summit: "Evolving Claude APIs for Agents" ### 2025 - Launched Claude Sonnet 4.5 with context management + memory tools for long-running agents - MCP donated to a standards body (open-sourced from Anthropic) ## Quotes > "Stainless has shaped how developers experience the Claude API since the start, and it's been great to work with them on that. Agents are only as useful as what they can connect to. We're excited to bring the Stainless team into Anthropic to advance Claude's ability to connect to data and tools." > — May 2026, Anthropic Stainless acquisition announcement ## Meetings <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/meeting AND [[Katelyn Lesse]] SORT file.name ASC --> ## Quotes <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/quote AND [[Katelyn Lesse]] SORT file.name ASC --> ## Books <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/book AND [[Katelyn Lesse]] SORT file.name ASC --> ## References - https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-acquires-stainless - https://x.com/katelyn_lesse - https://www.linkedin.com/in/katelynlesse/ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqW68Is_Kj4 (AI Engineering Code Summit talk) - https://every.to/chain-of-thought/inside-anthropic-s-2026-developer-conference