Staff+ Software Engineer, Inference Runtime

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.

About the role

Anthropics Inference organization serves Claude to millions of users and enterprise customers with the speed reliability and efficiency that frontier AI demands. We build across GPUs TPUs and Trainium and the complexity of our development environment grows with every platform we add.

Were looking for a Staff Engineer to be a technical lead for Inference Runtime: the team that owns the shared accelerator-agnostic core of our inference serving stack whose performance correctness and abstractions every accelerator builds on.

This is a senior IC role with broad technical ownership. Youll set technical direction for the runtimes architecture its release and validation systems and the workflows engineers use to develop on top of it. You will partner across Inferencing to make hard calls on boundaries prioritization and tradeoffs across heterogeneous accelerator platforms.

Youll pair with the teams Engineering Manager who owns hiring and people development while you own the technical roadmap and drive the work representing the team in cross-org efforts spanning serving scaling and accelerator teams.

This role is for someone who has been the technical anchor of a platform with many internal consumers who thinks in systems and feedback loops and who gets real satisfaction from building abstractions that hold up as the system scales another order of magnitude.

Key responsibilities

• Set technical direction for the team owning the architecture and roadmap for the shared runtime of the inference serving stack

• Own and evolve the accelerator-agnostic runtime itself its interfaces internal boundaries and build structure including hands-on work in a performance-sensitive Rust and Python codebase

• Keep the platforms expansion cost low by ensuring new models and deployment targets pay only for their own specialization and edge cases stitch back into the core easily

• Drive efficient accelerator usage utilization scheduling memory management across GPU TPU and Trainium

• Build the runtimes validation surface around partitioned builds change-scoped testing and canary/shadow/rollback as first-class mechanisms

• Act as a technical counterpart to Anthropics central Infrastructure org on the compilers build systems and toolchains the runtime depends on contributing Inferences performance and correctness requirements and making the call on build vs. adopt

• Mentor engineers on the team through design review code review and direct collaboration raising the technical bar without owning headcount

Minimum qualifications

• Deep background in systems engineering or ML infrastructure with the ability to go hands-on with performance profiling latency and throughput optimization and systems debugging at scale

• Real depth in at least one accelerator ecosystem (CUDA/GPU TPU or Trainium/AWS Neuron) and genuine appetite to keep the runtime agnostic across all of them

• Have significant software engineering experience with a strong background in high-performance large-scale distributed systems serving millions of users

• A track record of defining and using engineering metrics to drive improvement: youve set SLOs on platform surfaces and driven escape rates release times latency or throughput in a measurable direction

• Experience driving technical alignment across organizational boundaries advocating for your teams needs while contributing to shared infrastructure

• Strong written and verbal communication and the ability to influence technical direction without formal authority

Preferred qualifications

• 8 years of software engineering experience with significant time as the technical lead or anchor on a platform inference runtime or ML infrastructure team

• Experience with ML compiler toolchains (XLA Triton NeuronX) or accelerator driver/firmware management at scale

• Background operating production as a validation surface at scale: shadow traffic canary populations automated baseline comparison fast rollback

• Experience with deterministic or simulation-based testing for hardware-dependent systems

• Experience with CI/CD systems at scale particularly for workloads involving accelerator hardware

• Familiarity with Kubernetes-based development and job scheduling environments

• Prior tech lead experience on a developer productivity or platform engineering team at a fast-growing AI/ML company

Logistics

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.

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 policy for using AI in our application process.