Staff+ Software Engineer, Observability

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

Benefits offered by this job

Equity donation matching

Generous vacation

Parental leave

Flexible working hours

SF office

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking Software Engineers for the Observability team within Infrastructure. You will design and build scalable telemetry ingest, storage pipelines, and instrumentation libraries to enable deep visibility and rapid troubleshooting across multi-cluster GPU/TPU clusters.

The role emphasizes kernel-level and high-throughput data challenges and collaboration across Research, Product, and Infrastructure teams.

Qualifications

• Experience building or operating observability systems at scale.
• Ability to design and operate high-throughput telemetry pipelines.
• Familiarity with tracing, profiling, and log analytics.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable telemetry ingest and storage pipelines for metrics, logs, traces, and error data across Anthropic's multi-cluster infrastructure
• Build observability solutions that give engineers deep, low-overhead visibility into system behavior across the fleet
• Own and evolve core observability platforms, leading migrations and architectural improvements that improve reliability, reduce cost, and scale with organizational growth
• Build instrumentation libraries, SDKs, and eBPF-based auto-instrumentation to emit high-quality telemetry, with and without code changes
• Reduce MTTR by building cross-signal correlation, unified query interfaces, and AI-assisted diagnostic tooling
• Improve fleet-wide efficiency by turning continuous profiling and telemetry into actionable insights across CPU, memory, and accelerators
• Partner with Research, Inference, Product, and Infrastructure teams to meet unique needs
• Experience building and operating large-scale observability or monitoring infrastructure
• Hands-on experience with observability signals end to end
• Understanding of high-throughput telemetry pipelines and tradeoffs in collecting, storing, querying data
• Comfort debugging below the application layer, in the kernel, network stack, or hardware
• Excellent communication skills and ability to partner with internal teams to improve operational visibility
• Ability to work independently on ambiguous, high-impact technical challenges

Skills

eBPF observability

kernel debugging

OpenTelemetry instrumentation

telemetry pipelines

AI-assisted diagnostics

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

OpenTelemetry

ClickHouse

BigQuery

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 is seeking Software Engineers to join our Observability team within the Infrastructure organization. The Observability team owns the monitoring and telemetry infrastructure that every engineer and researcher at Anthropic depends on, from metrics and logging pipelines to distributed tracing, profiling, error analytics, alerting, and the dashboards and query interfaces that make it all actionable. By joining this team, you'll have a direct impact on the reliability and operational excellence of Anthropic's research and product systems.

As Anthropic scales its infrastructure across large GPU, TPU, and Trainium clusters, the volume and complexity of operational data is growing by orders of magnitude, and an increasing share of the most challenging problems live below the application layer. We're building next-generation observability systems, including high-throughput telemetry pipelines, fleet-wide continuous profiling, eBPF-based tracing and network visibility, and agentic diagnostic tools, so engineers can detect, diagnose, and resolve issues in minutes rather than hours, even when the answer lies in the kernel, the network stack, or an accelerator rather than on a dashboard.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build scalable telemetry ingest and storage pipelines for metrics, logs, traces, and error data across Anthropic's multi-cluster infrastructure
• Build observability solutions that give engineers deep, low-overhead visibility into system behavior across the fleet
• Own and evolve core observability platforms, leading migrations and architectural improvements that improve reliability, reduce cost, and scale with organizational growth
• Build instrumentation libraries, SDKs, and eBPF-based auto-instrumentation to emit high-quality telemetry, with and without code changes
• Reduce mean time to detection and resolution by building cross-signal correlation (from kernel-level events up to application traces), unified query interfaces, and AI-assisted diagnostic tooling
• Improve fleet-wide efficiency by turning continuous profiling and utilization telemetry into actionable optimization insights across CPU, memory, and accelerator fleets
• Partner with Research, Inference, Product, and Infrastructure teams to ensure observability solutions meet the unique needs of each organization
• Experience building and operating large-scale observability or monitoring infrastructure
• Hands-on experience with observability signals end to end, from instrumentation through ingest to query and analysis
• Understanding of high-throughput telemetry pipelines and the tradeoffs involved in collecting, storing, and querying operational data at scale
• Comfort debugging below the application layer, in the kernel, the network stack, or the hardware
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to partner with internal teams to improve their operational visibility and incident response capabilities
• Ability to work independently on ambiguous, high-impact technical challenges

Preferred qualifications

• Experience building or operating eBPF-based observability in production, such as tracing, profiling, or network visibility
• Experience running continuous profiling at fleet scale, including managing overhead budgets and symbolization
• Kernel- and syscall-level debugging experience and performance engineering skills
• Experience profiling or instrumenting accelerator workloads
• Experience operating metrics systems at very high cardinality, or large-scale telemetry storage backends
• Experience with log storage migrations or operating columnar databases (e.g., ClickHouse, BigQuery) for analytics workloads
• Experience with OpenTelemetry instrumentation, collector pipelines, and tail-based sampling strategies
• Interest in applying AI/LLMs to operational workflows such as automated root cause analysis, anomaly detection, or intelligent alerting
• Enthusiasm for building foundational infrastructure

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.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. 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.

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.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey.Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in aconfidential file.

As set forth in Anthropic’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

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An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.