Sr. Software Engineer, Inference

Position: Staff + Sr. Software Engineer, Inference
# Staff + Sr. Software Engineer, Inference Job Type /

Location:

San Francisco Experience

Required:

6+ years

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 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.

You may be a good fit if you:

Have significant software engineering experience, particularly with distributed systems

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 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 Strong candidates may also have experience with:

High-performance, large-scale distributed systems

Implementing and deploying machine learning systems at scale

Load balancing, request routing, or traffic management systemsLLM inference optimization, batching, and caching strategies

Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure)
Python or Rust Representative projects:

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

Deadline to apply:
None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

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.

Annual Salary:$300,000 - $485,000 USDLogistics

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.…