Staff + Senior Software Engineer, Inference Deployment

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 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.

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
• 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

Requirements

• 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
• Care about the societal impacts of your work

Qualifications

• 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; 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

Skills

• 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

Benefits

• Annual compensation range: $320,000—$485,000 USD
• 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.

Pay

• Annual Salary: $320,000—$485,000 USD

Schedule

• 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.