Staff + Senior Software Engineer, Inference

Anthropics 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.

Our Inference team is responsible for building and maintaining the critical systems that serve Claude to millions of users worldwide. We bring Claude to life by serving our models via the industrys largest compute-agnostic inference deployments. We are responsible for the entire stack from intelligent request routing to fleet-wide orchestration across diverse AI accelerators.

The team has a dual mandate: maximizing compute efficiency to reliably serve our explosive customer growth while enabling breakthrough research by giving our scientists the high-performance inference infrastructure they need to develop next-generation models. We tackle complex distributed systems challenges across multiple accelerator families and emerging AI hardware running in multiple cloud platforms.

Inference systems are highly performance sensitive distributed systems. Inference serves hundreds of thousands of customers every day and the size & span of the inference fleet requires sophisticated routing scaling and networking systems.

• Design build and maintain the distributed systems that serve Claude to millions of users worldwide

• Develop resilient flexible systems that adapt in real time to real world events

• Develop intelligent request routing load balancing and traffic management systems across thousands of accelerators

• Maximize compute efficiency across the fleet by autoscaling and orchestrating production research and experimental workloads

• Build and operate production-grade deployment pipelines for releasing new models to users

• Provide high-performance inference infrastructure that enables researchers to develop next-generation models

• Integrate new AI accelerator platforms and support inference for new model architectures

• Significant software engineering experience particularly with distributed systems

• Results-oriented with a bias towards flexibility and impact

• Willingness to pick up slack even if it goes outside your job description

• Desire to learn more about machine learning systems and infrastructure

• Thrive in environments where technical excellence directly drives both business results and research breakthroughs

• Care about the societal impacts of your work

• Experience with high-performance large-scale distributed systems

• Experience implementing and deploying machine learning systems at scale

• Experience with load balancing request routing or traffic management systems

• Familiarity with LLM inference optimization batching and caching strategies

• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (AWS GCP Azure)

• Proficiency in Python or Rust

• Designing intelligent routing algorithms that optimize request distribution across many accelerators in different environments

• Autoscaling our compute fleet to dynamically match supply with demand across production research and experimental workloads

• Building production-grade deployment pipelines for releasing new models to millions of users reliably

• Contributing to new inference features

• Supporting inference for new model architectures

• Analyzing observability data to tune performance based on real-world production workloads

• Managing multi-region deployments and geographic routing for global customers

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

Minimum education: Bachelors 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 arent 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 youre interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones were 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 Anthropic recruiters only contact you some cases we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money fees or banking information before your first day. If youre ever unsure about a communication dont click any linksvisit for confirmed position openings.

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. Were 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.

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. Guidance on Candidates AI Usage:Learn aboutour policy for using AI in our application process.