Staff + Senior Software Engineer, Inference

San Francisco, CAfull timeOn Site

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senior

$320k–$485k

H1B: yes

Anthropic Staff + Senior Software Engineer, Inference at Anthropic build and maintain distributed systems serving Claude to millions worldwide. The role focuses on maximizing compute efficiency and enabling high-performance inference infrastructure for research.

Responsibilities

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 industry’s 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

Qualification

Results-orientedWillingness to pick up slackExperience with high-performanceExperience with load balancingProficiency in Python or RustRepresentative projects

Required

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

Preferred

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