Staff+ Software Engineer, Inference Runtime

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 405,000 - 485,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic’s Inference organization seeks a Staff Engineer to be the technical lead for Inference Runtime—the shared, accelerator‑agnostic core of our inference serving stack. You will set the architecture, roadmap, and validation workflows for a system used across GPUs, TPUs, and Trainium.

You’ll mentor engineers, partner with the Infrastructure org, and own performance and correctness requirements, balancing cross‑platform tradeoffs while driving the team toward scalable abstractions as the

Qualifications

• Deep background in systems engineering or ML infrastructure with hands-on performance profiling and debugging at scale.
• Significant experience with at least one accelerator ecosystem (CUDA/GPUs, TPU, or Trainium/AWS Neuron) and runtime agnosticism.
• Extensive software engineering experience in large-scale distributed systems serving millions of users.
• Experience defining and using engineering metrics to drive improvements (SLOs, escape rates, latency or throughput).
• Ability to drive technical alignment across teams and communicate effectively without formal authority.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction, owning architecture and roadmap for the shared runtime of the inference serving stack.
• Own and evolve the accelerator-agnostic runtime interfaces, boundaries, and build structure with hands-on work in Rust and Python.
• Keep expansion costs low by aligning models and deployment targets with core capabilities.
• Drive efficient accelerator usage across GPU, TPU, and Trainium platforms.
• Build validation surfaces with partitioned builds, canary/shadow/rollback mechanisms.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure on compilers, build systems, and toolchains to meet performance requirements.
• Mentor engineers through design/code reviews while raising technical standards.

Skills

Systems engineering

Performance profiling

Latency optimization

Throughput optimization

Distributed systems

SLOs & metrics

Cross-org collaboration

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

CUDA/GPU

TPU

Trainium/AWS Neuron

Rust

Python

Kubernetes

CI/CD

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

Anthropic’s Inference organization serves Claude to millions of users and enterprise customers with the speed, reliability, and efficiency that frontier AI demands. We build across GPUs, TPUs, and Trainium, and the complexity of our development environment grows with every platform we add.

We’re looking for a Staff Engineer to be a technical lead for Inference Runtime: the team that owns the shared, accelerator-agnostic core of our inference serving stack, whose performance, correctness, and abstractions every accelerator builds on.

This is a senior IC role with broad technical ownership. You’ll set technical direction for the runtime’s architecture, its release and validation systems, and the workflows engineers use to develop on top of it. You will partner across Inferencing to make hard calls on boundaries, prioritization, and tradeoffs across heterogeneous accelerator platforms.

You’ll pair with the team’s Engineering Manager, who owns hiring and people development, while you own the technical roadmap and drive the work, representing the team in cross-org efforts spanning serving, scaling, and accelerator teams.

This role is for someone who has been the technical anchor of a platform with many internal consumers, who thinks in systems and feedback loops, and who gets real satisfaction from building abstractions that hold up as the system scales another order of magnitude.

Key responsibilities

• Set technical direction for the team, owning the architecture and roadmap for the shared runtime of the inference serving stack

• Own and evolve the accelerator-agnostic runtime itself – its interfaces, internal boundaries, and build structure – including hands‑on work in a performance-sensitive Rust and Python codebase

• Keep the platform’s expansion cost low by ensuring new models and deployment targets pay only for their own specialization, and edge cases stitch back into the core easily

• Drive efficient accelerator usage – utilization, scheduling, memory management – across GPU, TPU, and Trainium

• Build the runtime’s validation surface around partitioned builds, change-scoped testing, and canary/shadow/rollback as first‑class mechanisms

• Act as a technical counterpart to Anthropic’s central Infrastructure org on the compilers, build systems, and toolchains the runtime depends on, contributing Inference’s performance and correctness requirements, and making the call on build vs. adopt

• Mentor engineers on the team through design review, code review, and direct collaboration, raising the technical bar without owning headcount

Minimum qualifications

• Deep background in systems engineering or ML infrastructure, with the ability to go hands‑on with performance profiling, latency and throughput optimization, and systems debugging at scale

• Real depth in at least one accelerator ecosystem (CUDA/GPU, TPU, or Trainium/AWS Neuron) and genuine appetite to keep the runtime agnostic across all of them

• Have significant software engineering experience, with a strong background in high‑performance, large‑scale distributed systems serving millions of users

• A track record of defining and using engineering metrics to drive improvement: you’ve set SLOs on platform surfaces, and driven escape rates, release times, latency, or throughput in a measurable direction

• Experience driving technical alignment across organizational boundaries, advocating for your team’s needs while contributing to shared infrastructure

• Strong written and verbal communication, and the ability to influence technical direction without formal authority

Preferred qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time as the technical lead or anchor on a platform, inference runtime, or ML infrastructure team

• Experience with ML compiler toolchains (XLA, Triton, NeuronX) or accelerator driver/firmware management at scale

• Background operating production as a validation surface at scale: shadow traffic, canary populations, automated baseline comparison, fast rollback

• Experience with deterministic or simulation‑based testing for hardware‑dependent systems

• Experience with CI/CD systems at scale, particularly for workloads involving accelerator hardware

• Familiarity with Kubernetes‑based development and job scheduling environments

• Prior tech lead experience on a developer productivity or platform engineering team at a fast‑growing AI/ML company

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings (“OTE”) range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$405,000—$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.