Staff+ Software Engineer, ML Sampling Path San Francisco, CA

Anthropic Limited; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 485,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic in San Francisco is hiring a Staff+ Software Engineer for the ML Sampling Path. You design, build, and operate backend systems processing tokens on Claude generation path, with focus on latency and reliability.

You own SLOs, lead incident response, implement safe deployment practices, and drive per-token performance with canaries, rollouts, and latency gating. Strong candidates have 8+ years in industry software engineering, experience with distributed systems, and a track record

Qualifications

• Designed, built, and operated high QPS systems in production.
• Strong foundation in distributed systems and SLO management.
• Experience with latency, reliability, and cost trade-offs in production systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the backend systems that process every token on Claude's generation path.
• Own latency and reliability end-to-end; define and maintain SLOs and error budgets; lead incident response and postmortems.
• Ship changes to the hot path rapidly with canaries and gradual rollouts; optimize per-token performance and cost.

Skills

High QPS systems

Distributed systems

Latency & reliability

SLO management

Incident response

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Equivalent experience

Job description

Staff+ Software Engineer, ML Sampling Path

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:

The Safeguards ML Sampling Path team builds and operates the production services that power Claude's safety systems. These services sit on the token generation path across every platform Claude runs on: every request must pass through them, and each millisecond of added latency is wait time for our users. You’ll keep p99 latency flat as traffic grows, build for robustness as dependencies time out or partially fail, and ship changes safely to a system that cannot go down.

What you'll do:

• Design, build, and operate the backend systems that process every token on the generation path for Claude requests, including the streaming contract with the API and inference engines.
• Own latency and reliability end to end: define and maintain SLOs and error budgets for added latency, time-to-first-token, and availability, and lead incident response and postmortem follow‑through.
• Ship changes to the hot path rapidly but safely — canaried and gradual rollouts, error budget and latency gating, fast rollbacks — and drive per-token performance: chase tail latency and keep cost flat as traffic, models, and checks per request grow.
• Set technical direction for the sampling path: lead design reviews, make latency, reliability, and cost trade‑off calls with the inference and research teams, mentor engineers, and raise the operational bar for the wider Safeguards organization.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have designed, built, and operated high QPS systems at global scale, and were accountable for them in production: incident response, outages, and postmortem-driven remediation.
• Have a strong foundation in distributed systems: replication, consistency tradeoffs, failure modes, and SLO management under load.
• Design systems for graceful degradation: you plan for a slow dependency, a dropped stream, or a half‑rolled-out deploy before it happens, and build so the system degrades predictably instead of failing.
• Have successfully shipped broad or all‑encompassing changes to mission critical systems (e.g., database migrations, interface changes, rewrites).

Strong candidates may also have:

• 8+ years of industry software engineering experience.
• Familiarity with LLM inference systems and transformer‑based models (not required, but a plus).

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.

$320,000 - $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.