Staff Software Engineer, AI Reliability

Anthropic; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 325,000 - 485,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking an AI Reliability Engineer (AIRE) to partner with teams across Anthropic to improve reliability from SDK to serving infrastructure. You will help design high-availability systems, lead incident response, and drive observability improvements across multiple regions and cloud providers.

We value reliability-minded software engineers with a holistic view of system composition and strong collaboration skills across the company.

Qualifications

• Strong background in distributed systems or reliability-focused roles.
• Experience with incident response and improving service reliability.
• Experience across SDK, API layers, and serving infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Develop Service Level Objectives for large language model serving systems.
• Design and implement monitoring and observability systems across the token path.
• Assist in design and implementation of high-availability serving infrastructure across regions and clouds.
• Lead incident response for critical AI services and drive post-incident improvements.
• Support reliability of safeguard model serving and safety commitments.

Skills

Distributed systems

SRE

Reliability engineering

Software engineering

Incident response

Education

Bachelor's degree

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

AIRE (AI Reliability Engineering) partners with teams across Anthropic to improve reliability across our most critical serving paths -- every hop from the SDK through our network, API layers, serving infrastructure, and accelerators and back. We jump into the trenches alongside partner teams to make the systems that deliver Claude more robust and resilient, be it during an incident or collaborating on projects.

Reliability here is an emergent phenomenon that transcends any single team's boundaries, so someone has to zoom out and look at the whole picture. That's us -- and it means few teams at Anthropic offer this kind of dynamic, cross-cutting exposure to the systems that matter most.

Responsibilities

• Develop appropriate Service Level Objectives for large language model serving systems, balancing availability and latency with development velocity
• Design and implement monitoring and observability systems across the token path
• Assist in the design and implementation of high-availability serving infrastructure across multiple regions and cloud provider
• Lead incident response for critical AI services, ensuring rapid recovery, thorough incident reviews, and systematic improvements
• Support the reliability of safeguard model serving – critical for both site reliability and Anthropic's safety commitments.

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Have strong distributed systems, infrastructure, or reliability backgrounds -- we're looking for reliability-minded software engineers and SREs
• Are curious and brave -- comfortable jumping into unfamiliar systems during an incident and helping drive resolution even when you don't have deep expertise yet
• Think holistically about how systems compose and where the seams are
• Can build lasting relationships across teams -- our engagement model depends on being welcomed as teammates, not outsiders with opinions
• Care about users and feel ownership over outcomes, even for systems you don't own
• Have excellent communication and collaboration skills -- you'll be partnering across the entire company
• Bring diverse experience -- the team's strength comes from people who've built product stacks, scaled databases, run massive distributed systems, and everything in between.

Strong Candidates May Also

• Have been an SRE, Production Engineer, or in similar reliability-focused roles on large scale systems
• Have experience operating large-scale model serving or training infrastructure (>1000 GPUs)
• Have experience with one or more ML hardware accelerators (GPUs, TPUs, Trainium)
• Understand ML-specific networking optimizations like RDMA and InfiniBand
• Have expertise in AI-specific observability tools and frameworks
• Have experience with chaos engineering and systematic resilience testing
• Have contributed to open-source infrastructure or ML tooling.

Annual Salary

$325,000—$485,000 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.

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.

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 about our policy for using AI in our application process.