Staff+ Software Engineer, Inference Runtime

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

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Flexible working hours

Generous vacation and parental leave

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the technical direction for the Inference Runtime. This senior role will involve optimizing a shared runtime across accelerators while mentoring fellow engineers to enhance technical standards.

Ideal candidates should have extensive experience in systems engineering, ML infrastructure, and possess software engineering expertise with distributed systems. A Bachelor’s degree is required, along with the ability to collaborate across technical and organizational boundaries.

Qualifications

• Deep background in systems engineering or ML infrastructure.
• Experience with accelerator ecosystems like CUDA/GPU.
• Significant software engineering experience.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for the inference serving stack.
• Own and evolve the accelerator-agnostic runtime.
• Drive efficient accelerator usage—including GPU and TPU.

Skills

Systems engineering

Performance profiling

Latency optimization

High-performance distributed systems

Bachelor's degree

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

CUDA

Kubernetes

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 are 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

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.

Benefits

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.