Staff Software Engineer, Inference

Anthropic; Dublin; Hybrid; EUR 80,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Flexible working hours

Generous vacation and parental leave

Job summary

A tech company specializing in AI in Dublin is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Inference team. This role involves building and optimizing critical systems that serve millions of users while enabling advanced AI research. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in software engineering, particularly in distributed systems. The company offers competitive compensation, flexible working hours, and a collaborative work environment focused on impactful AI research.

Qualifications

• Significant software engineering experience, particularly with distributed systems.
• Results-oriented and flexible with a focus on impact.
• Willingness to learn about machine learning systems and infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Work end to end to identify and address infrastructure blockers.
• Optimize request distribution across thousands of accelerators.
• Dynamically manage compute resources based on workflow demands.

Skills

Distributed systems

Performance optimization

Service orchestration

Request routing

Machine learning systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in a related field

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Python

Rust

Job description

Overview

Anthropic’s 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

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 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.

As a Staff Software Engineer on our Inference team, you will work end to end, identifying and addressing key infrastructure blockers to serve Claude to millions of users while enabling breakthrough AI research. Strong candidates should have familiarity with performance optimization, distributed systems, large-scale service orchestration, and intelligent request routing. Familiarity with LLM inference optimization, batching strategies, and multi-accelerator deployments is highly encouraged but not strictly necessary.

Strong candidates may also have experience with

• Implementing and deploying machine learning systems at scale
• Load balancing, request routing, or traffic management systems
• LLM inference optimization, batching, and caching strategies
• Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP)
• Python or Rust

You may be a good fit if you

• Have significant software engineering experience, particularly with distributed systems
• Are results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
• Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
• Want 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

Representative projects across the org

• 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)
• 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.

Logistics

• Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.
• Location: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. Some roles may require more time in offices.
• Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas. If we make you an offer, we will make reasonable efforts to assist with visa processes with support from an immigration lawyer.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every qualification as listed. We think AI systems like the ones we’re building have enormous social and ethical implications, and we strive to include diverse perspectives on our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. Legitimate recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If unsure, visit the Careers page at anthropic.com/careers for confirmed openings.

Why Anthropic

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on a few large-scale research efforts, valuing impact and steerable, trustworthy AI over smaller tasks. We are highly collaborative and prioritize communication skills alongside technical excellence.

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 collaborative office environment.