TPU Kernel Engineer

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.

As a TPU Kernel Engineer, you'll be responsible for identifying and addressing performance issues across many different ML systems, including research, training, and inference. A significant portion of this work will involve designing and optimizing kernels for the TPU. You will also provide feedback to researchers about how model changes impact performance. Strong candidates will have a track record of solving large-scale systems problems and low-level optimization.

• Have significant experience optimizing ML systems for TPUs, GPUs, or other accelerators
• Are results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
• Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
• Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
• Want to learn more about machine learning research
• Care about the societal impacts of your work

• High performance, large-scale ML systems
• Designing and implementing kernels for TPUs or other ML accelerators
• Understanding accelerators at a deep level, e.g. a background in computer architecture
• ML framework internals
• Language modeling with transformers

• Implement low-latency, high-throughput sampling for large language models
• Adapt existing models for low-precision inference
• Build quantitative models of system performance
• Design and implement custom collective communication algorithms
• Debug kernel performance at the assembly level

The expected salary range for this position is:

$315,000 - $560,000 USD

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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.

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.

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation…