Staff+ Software Engineer, Inference Runtime

Details

Anthropic’s Inference organization serves Claude to millions of users and enterprise customers, delivering the speed, reliability, and efficiency required for frontier AI.

This role is a senior IC position for a technical lead of Inference Runtime: the shared, accelerator-agnostic core of the inference serving stack. This runtime’s performance, correctness, and abstractions are foundational for every accelerator.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for the team, owning the architecture and roadmap for the shared runtime of the inference serving stack
• Own and evolve the accelerator-agnostic runtime itself—its interfaces, internal boundaries, and build structure—including hands-on work in a performance-sensitive Rust and Python codebase
• Keep platform expansion cost low by ensuring new models and deployment targets pay only for their own specialization, and stitch edge cases back into the core easily
• Drive efficient accelerator usage—utilization, scheduling, memory management—across GPU, TPU, and Trainium
• Build the runtime’s validation surface around partitioned builds, change-scoped testing, and canary/shadow/rollback as first-class mechanisms
• Act as a technical counterpart to Anthropic’s central Infrastructure org on compilers, build systems, and toolchains the runtime depends on, contributing Inference’s performance and correctness requirements and making the call on build vs. adopt
• Mentor engineers on the team through design review, code review, and direct collaboration, raising the technical bar without owning headcount

Requirements

• Deep background in systems engineering or ML infrastructure, with ability to go hands-on with performance profiling, latency and throughput optimization, and systems debugging at scale
• Real depth in at least one accelerator ecosystem (CUDA/GPU, TPU, or Trainium/AWS Neuron) and appetite to keep the runtime agnostic across all of them
• Significant software engineering experience, with strong background in high-performance, large-scale distributed systems serving millions of users
• Track record of defining and using engineering metrics to drive improvement: setting SLOs on platform surfaces and moving escape rates, release times, latency, or throughput in measurable directions
• Experience driving technical alignment across organizational boundaries, advocating for the team’s needs while contributing to shared infrastructure
• Strong written and verbal communication, able to influence technical direction without formal authority

Preferred qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time as technical lead/anchor on a platform, inference runtime, or ML infrastructure team
• Experience with ML compiler toolchains (XLA, Triton, NeuronX) or accelerator driver/firmware management at scale
• Experience operating production at scale as a validation surface: shadow traffic, canary populations, automated baseline comparison, fast rollback
• Experience with deterministic or simulation-based testing for hardware-dependent systems
• Experience with CI/CD systems at scale, particularly for workloads involving accelerator hardware
• Familiarity with Kubernetes-based development and job scheduling environments
• Prior tech lead experience on developer productivity or platform engineering teams at fast-growing AI/ML companies

Compensation

Annual Salary: $405,000 - $485,000 USD

Logistics

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Location-based hybrid policy: Staff are expected to be in one of the offices at least 25% of the time (some roles may require more time)
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic sponsors visas and will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa if they make an offer (they retain an immigration lawyer to help)