Software Engineer, Sandboxing (Systems)

About Anthropic

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.

Anthropic is seeking a Linux OS and System Programming Subject Matter Expert to join our Infrastructure this role youll work on accelerating and optimizing our virtualization and VM workloads that power our AI infrastructure. Your expertise in low-level system programming kernel optimization and virtualization technologies will be crucial in ensuring Anthropic can scale our compute infrastructure efficiently and reliably for training and serving frontier AI models.

Responsibilities:

• Optimize our virtualization stack improving performance reliability and efficiency of our VM environments
• Design and implement kernel modules drivers and system-level components to enhance our compute infrastructure
• Investigate and resolve performance bottlenecks in virtualized environments
• Collaborate with cloud engineering teams to optimize interactions between our workloads and underlying hardware
• Develop tooling for monitoring and improving virtualization performance
• Work with our ML engineers to understand their computational needs and optimize our systems accordingly
• Contribute to the design and implementation of our next-generation compute infrastructure
• Share knowledge with team members on low-level systems programming and Linux kernel internals
• Partner with cloud providers to influence hardware and platform features for AI workloads

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have experience with Linux kernel development system programming or related low-level software engineering
• Understand virtualization technologies (KVM Xen QEMU etc.) and their performance characteristics
• Have experience optimizing system performance for compute-intensive workloads
• Are familiar with modern CPU architectures and memory systems
• Have strong C/C programming skills and ideally experience with systems languages like Rust
• Understand Linux resource management scheduling and memory management
• Have experience profiling and debugging system-level performance issues
• Are comfortable diving into unfamiliar codebases and technical domains
• Are results-oriented with a bias towards practical solutions and measurable impact
• Care about the societal impacts of AI and are passionate about building safe reliable systems

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

• GPU virtualization and acceleration technologies
• Cloud infrastructure at scale (AWS GCP)
• Container technologies and their underlying implementation (Docker containerd runc OCI)
• eBPF programming and kernel tracing tools
• OS-level security hardening and isolation techniques
• Developing custom scheduling algorithms for specialized workloads
• Performance optimization for ML/AI specific workloads
• Network stack optimization and high-performance networking
• Experience with TPUs custom ASICs or other ML accelerators

Representative projects:

• Optimizing kernel parameters and VM configurations to reduce inference latency for large language models
• Implementing custom memory management schemes for large-scale distributed training
• Developing specialized I/O schedulers to prioritize ML workloads
• Creating lightweight virtualization solutions tailored for AI inference
• Building monitoring and instrumentation tools to identify system-level bottlenecks
• Enhancing communication between VMs for distributed training workloads

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

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelors 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 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 addresses. 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.

How were 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. 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.

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