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Anthropic

Staff + Senior Software Engineer, Inference

Anthropic
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hybrid staff full-time $320,000-$485,000 USD San Francisco, CA

First indexed 9 Jun 2026

Description

About the role

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.

Key responsibilities

  • Design, build, and maintain the distributed systems that serve Claude to millions of users worldwide
  • 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
  • Use observability data to tune and improve performance based on real-world production workloads

Minimum qualifications

  • 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
  • Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
  • 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 qualifications

  • 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 thousands of accelerators
  • 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
  • Integrating new AI accelerator platforms to maintain our hardware-agnostic competitive advantage
  • Contributing to new inference features (e.g., structured sampling, prompt caching)
  • 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

Logistics

  • Minimum education: Bachelor’s 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 aren't 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.

How we're 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. We're 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.

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.

This listing is enriched and indexed by YubHub. To apply, use the employer's original posting: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5245851008