Staff + Sr. Software Engineer, Scaling

Anthropic; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 485,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity donation matching

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Job summary

Anthropic is expanding its Inference team in Seattle to scale Claude’s deployment. You will work on distributed inference infrastructure, real-time routing, and cross-cloud orchestration for millions of users.

The role focuses on efficiency, reliability, and large-scale systems that enable cutting-edge ML research. Ideal candidates have strong distributed systems experience, a passion for ML-scale infrastructure, and a drive to impact safety and reliability at scale.

Qualifications

• Significant software engineering experience in distributed systems.
• Bias towards flexibility and impact in delivery.
• Willingness to take on additional responsibilities beyond job description.
• Desire to learn more about machine learning systems and infrastructure.
• Thrive in environments where technical excellence drives results and breakthroughs.
• Care about societal impacts of work.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain distributed systems serving Claude to millions of users.
• Develop resilient, flexible systems responsive to real-world events.
• Create intelligent request routing, load balancing, and traffic management across accelerators and clouds.
• Maximize compute efficiency and control costs via autoscaling across production, research, and experiments.
• Build and operate deployment pipelines for new models.
• Provide high-performance inference infrastructure enabling researchers to prototype next-generation models.
• Integrate new accelerator platforms for inference across model architectures.

Skills

Distributed systems

Results-oriented

Flexibility

Learning mindset

Societal impact awareness

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Azure

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

Our Inference team is responsible for building and scaling the critical systems that serve Claude to millions of users worldwide. We bring Claude to life by serving our models via the industry’s largest compute-agnostic inference deployments. We are responsible for the entire stack from intelligent request routing to fleet-wide orchestration across diverse AI accelerators.

The team has a dual mandate: maximizing compute efficiency to reliably serve our explosive customer growth, while enabling breakthrough research by giving our scientists the high-performance inference infrastructure they need to develop next-generation models. We tackle complex, distributed systems challenges across multiple accelerator families and emerging AI hardware running in multiple cloud platforms.

Inference systems are highly performance sensitive distributed systems. Inference serves hundreds of thousands of customers every day, and the size & span of the inference fleet requires sophisticated routing, scaling, and networking systems.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain the distributed systems that serve Claude to millions of users worldwide
• Develop resilient, flexible systems that adapt in real time to real world events
• Develop intelligent request routing, load balancing, and traffic management systems across thousands of accelerators and multiple cloud providers
• Maximize compute efficiency and optimize cost across the fleet by autoscaling and orchestrating production, research, and experimental workloads across multiple cloud providers
• Build and operate production-grade deployment pipelines for releasing new models to users
• Provide high-performance inference infrastructure that enables researchers to develop next-generation models
• Integrate new AI accelerator platforms and support inference for new model architectures

Minimum Qualifications

• Significant software engineering experience, particularly with distributed systems
• Results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
• Willingness to pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
• Desire to learn more about machine learning systems and infrastructure
• Thrive in environments where technical excellence directly drives both business results and research breakthroughs
• Care about the societal impacts of your work

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with high-performance, large-scale distributed systems
• Experience implementing and deploying machine learning systems at scale
• Experience with load balancing, request routing, or traffic management systems
• Familiarity with LLM inference optimization, batching, and caching strategies
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Proficiency in Python or Rust

Representative projects

• Designing intelligent routing algorithms that optimize request distribution across many accelerators in different environments
• Autoscaling our compute fleet to dynamically match supply with demand across production, research, and experimental workloads
• Building production-grade deployment pipelines for releasing new models to millions of users reliably
• Contributing to new inference features
• Supporting inference for new model architectures
• Analyzing observability data to tune performance based on real-world production workloads
• Managing multi-region deployments and geographic routing for global customers

Annual Salary

$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.

Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage:

Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.

Your safety matters to us.

To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

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.