Staff+ Software Engineer, Inference Runtime

About the role

The Inference organization at Anthropic serves Claude to millions of users and enterprise customers with the speed, reliability, and efficiency that frontier AI demands. We build across GPUs, TPUs, and Trainium, and the complexity of our development environment grows with every platform we add.

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 the platform's expansion cost low by ensuring new models and deployment targets pay only for their own specialization, and edge cases stitch back into the core easily
• Build the runtime's validation surface around partitioned builds, change-scoped testing, and canary/shadow/rollback as first-class mechanisms
• Drive efficient accelerator usage – utilization, scheduling, memory management – across GPU, TPU, and Trainium
• Act as a technical counterpart to Anthropic's central Infrastructure org on the 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 the 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 genuine appetite to keep the runtime agnostic across all of them
• Significant software engineering experience, with a strong background in high-performance, large-scale distributed systems serving millions of users
• A track record of defining and using engineering metrics to drive improvement: you've set SLOs on platform surfaces, and driven escape rates, release times, latency, or throughput in a measurable direction
• Experience driving technical alignment across organizational boundaries, advocating for your team's needs while contributing to shared infrastructure
• Strong written and verbal communication, and the ability to influence technical direction without formal authority

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time as the technical lead or 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
• Background operating production as a validation surface at scale: 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 a developer productivity or platform engineering team at a fast-growing AI/ML company