Performance Engineer

SignalAI; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 280,000 - 850,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Optional equity donation matching

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

A lovely office space

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a Performance Engineer to diagnose and optimize large-scale distributed systems. You will improve throughput and robustness while growing to become an ML expert, collaborating across research and engineering teams.

The role emphasizes problem solving, paired programming, and a strong interest in ML research with a focus on societal impact and safety.

Qualifications

• Significant software engineering or ML experience, particularly at supercomputing scale.
• Willing to pair program and collaborate across teams.
• Interest in ML research and societal impact.

Responsibilities

• Identify system problems and develop scalable solutions to optimize throughput and robustness.
• Implement low-latency high-throughput sampling for large language models.
• Develop GPU kernels for low-precision inference and system performance modeling.
• Design fault-tolerant distributed systems with complex network topologies.

Skills

Software engineering experience

Machine learning experience

Results-oriented

Collaborative work

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

GPU/Accelerator programming

Low-latency sampling

GPU kernels

Transformers

Job description

About Anthropic

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

Running machine learning (ML) algorithms at our scale often requires solving novel systems problems. As a Performance Engineer, you'll be responsible for identifying these problems, and then developing systems that optimize the throughput and robustness of our largest distributed systems. Strong candidates here will have a track record of solving large-scale systems problems and will be excited to grow to become an expert in ML also.

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Have significant software engineering or machine learning experience, particularly at supercomputing scale
• Are results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
• Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
• Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
• Want to learn more about machine learning research
• Care about the societal impacts of your work

Strong Candidates May Also Have Experience With

• High performance, large-scale ML systems
• GPU/Accelerator programming
• ML framework internals
• OS internals
• Language modeling with transformers

Representative Projects

• Implement low-latency high-throughput sampling for large language models
• Implement GPU kernels to adapt our models to low-precision inference
• Write a custom load-balancing algorithm to optimize serving efficiency
• Build quantitative models of system performance
• Design and implement a fault-tolerant distributed system running with a complex network topology
• Debug kernel-level network latency spikes in a containerized environment

Deadline to apply

None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

Annual Salary

$280,000 - $850,000 USD

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.

We think AI systems like the ones we're 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.

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
• A lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues