Staff Software Engineer, AI Reliability

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 325,000 - 485,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship available

Opportunity to work in dynamic teams

Flexible hybrid work policy

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a Reliability Engineer to enhance the reliability of AI services in San Francisco. The role involves developing Service Level Objectives, designing monitoring systems, and leading incident responses. Ideal candidates have strong backgrounds in distributed systems or site reliability engineering, excellent communication skills, and are comfortable collaborating across teams. Salary ranges from $325,000 to $485,000, and the position requires a Bachelor's degree or similar experience.

Qualifications

• Strong reliability-focused background in software engineering or SRE roles.
• Excellent at building relationships across teams to enhance reliability.
• Comfortable addressing incidents in unfamiliar systems.

Responsibilities

• Develop Service Level Objectives for language model serving systems.
• Design monitoring systems across the token path.
• Lead incident response for critical AI services.

Skills

Strong distributed systems knowledge

Excellent communication skills

Ability to collaborate across teams

Experience with large-scale systems

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

ML hardware accelerators (GPUs, TPUs)

Observability tools

Job description

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. It’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 providers
• 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

Qualifications

• Strong distributed systems, infrastructure, or reliability background – we’re looking for reliability‑minded software engineers and SREs
• Curious and brave – comfortable jumping into unfamiliar systems during an incident and helping drive resolution even when you don’t have deep expertise yet
• Thinks holistically about how systems compose and where the seams are
• Can build lasting relationships across teams – the 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
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills – you’ll be partnering across the entire company
• Diverse experience – people who have built product stacks, scaled databases, run massive distributed systems, and everything in between strengthen the team

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience as an SRE, Production Engineer, or in similar reliability‑focused roles on large‑scale systems
• Experience operating large‑scale model serving or training infrastructure (over 1000 GPUs)
• Experience with ML hardware accelerators (GPUs, TPUs, Trainium)
• Understanding of ML‑specific networking optimizations like RDMA and InfiniBand
• Expertise in AI‑specific observability tools and frameworks
• Experience with chaos engineering and systematic resilience testing
• Contributions 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. We are not able to sponsor every role and every candidate, but if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa.