Staff+ Software Engineer, ML Sampling Path (AI)

Location: San Francisco, CA; hybrid policy requiring staff to be in one of the offices at least 25% of the time

Annual salary: $320,000–$485,000 USD

Company

Anthropic builds reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems designed to be safe and beneficial for users and society.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate backend services that process every token on Claude’s generation path, including streaming contracts with APIs and inference engines.
• Own latency and reliability end to end by defining SLOs and error budgets for latency, time to first token, and availability.
• Lead incident response, postmortem remediation, and operational improvements.
• Ship hot-path changes through canary and gradual rollouts with latency and error-budget gates and fast rollbacks.
• Optimize per-token performance, tail latency, and cost as traffic, models, and checks per request scale.
• Set technical direction through design reviews, trade-off decisions, mentoring, and operational standards for the Safeguards organization.

Requirements

• Experience designing, building, and operating high-QPS systems at global scale in production.
• Experience with incident response, outages, and postmortem-driven remediation.
• Strong foundation in distributed systems, including replication, consistency trade-offs, failure modes, and SLO management under load.
• Experience designing for graceful degradation when dependencies slow down, streams drop, or deployments are partially rolled out.
• Experience delivering broad or all-encompassing changes to mission-critical systems, such as database migrations, interface changes, or rewrites.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent education, training, or professional experience in a relevant field.

Nice to have

• 8+ years of industry software engineering experience.
• Familiarity with LLM inference systems and transformer-based models.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative research environment focused on large-scale AI safety efforts.
• Flexible working hours.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Competitive benefits and optional equity donation matching.
• Office environment designed for collaboration.
• Visa sponsorship is available, with immigration-lawyer support, subject to role and candidate eligibility.