Staff and Senior Software Engineer (Inference Infrastructure)

• Our Inference team is responsible for building and maintaining 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 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
• Design, build, and maintain the distributed systems that serve Claude to millions of users worldwide
• Develop intelligent request routing, load balancing, and traffic management systems across thousands of accelerators
• Maximize compute efficiency across the fleet by autoscaling and orchestrating production, research, and experimental workloads
• 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
• Use observability data to tune and improve performance based on real-world production workloads
• Designing intelligent routing algorithms that optimize request distribution across thousands of accelerators
• 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
• Integrating new AI accelerator platforms to maintain our hardware-agnostic competitive advantage
• Contributing to new inference features (e.g., structured sampling, prompt caching)
• 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

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents
• Inclusive fertility benefits via Carrot Fertility
• 22 weeks of paid parental leave
• Flexible paid time off and absence policies
• Mental health support for you and your dependents
• Competitive salary and equity packages
• Optional equity donation matching at a 1:1 ratio, up to 25% of your equity grant
• Retirement plans with competitive matching
• Life and income protection plans
• $500/month flexible wellness and time saver stipend
• Commuter benefits
• Annual education stipend
• Home office stipends
• Relocation support for those moving for Anthropic
• Daily meals and snacks in the office

• Care about the societal impacts of your work
• Willingness to pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
• Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
• Desire to learn more about machine learning systems and infrastructure
• Thrive in environments where technical excellence directly drives both business results and research breakthroughs
• Significant software engineering experience, particularly with distributed systems
• Results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
• Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
• 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
• Experience with load balancing, request routing, or traffic management systems
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Proficiency in Python or Rust
• Experience implementing and deploying machine learning systems at scale
• Experience with high-performance, large-scale distributed systems
• Familiarity with LLM inference optimization, batching, and caching strategies