Staff / Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Inference

About Anthropic

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

The Cloud Inference team scales and optimizes Claude to serve the massive audiences of developers and enterprise companies across AWS, GCP, Azure, and future cloud service providers (CSPs). We own the end-to-end product of Claude on each cloud platform—from API integration and intelligent request routing to inference execution, capacity management, and day-to-day operations.

Our engineers are extremely high leverage: we simultaneously drive multiple major revenue streams while optimizing one of Anthropic's most precious resources—compute. As we expand to more cloud platforms, the complexity of managing inference efficiently across providers with different hardware, networking stacks, and operational models grows significantly. We need engineers who can navigate these platform differences, build robust abstractions that work across providers, and make smart infrastructure decisions that keep us cost-effective at massive scale.

Your work will increase the scale at which our services operate, accelerate our ability to reliably launch new frontier models and innovative features to customers across all platforms, and ensure our LLMs meet rigorous safety, performance, and security standards.

What You'll Do

• Design and build infrastructure that serves Claude across multiple CSPs, accounting for differences in compute hardware, networking, APIs, and operational models
• Collaborate with CSP partner engineering teams to resolve operational issues, influence provider roadmaps, and stand up end-to-end serving on new cloud platforms
• Design and evolve CI/CD automation systems, including validation and deployment pipelines, that reliably ship new model versions to millions of users across cloud platforms without regressions 
• Design interfaces and tooling abstractions across CSPs that enable cost-effective inference management, scale across providers, and reduce per-platform complexity
• Contribute to capacity planning and autoscaling strategies that dynamically match supply with demand across CSP validation and production workloads
• Optimize inference cost and performance across providers—designing workload placement and routing systems that direct requests to the most cost-effective accelerator and region
• Contribute to inference features that must work consistently across all platforms
• Analyze observability data across providers to identify performance bottlenecks, cost anomalies, and regressions, and drive remediation based on real-world production workloads

You May Be a Good Fit If You:

• Have significant software engineering experience, with a strong background in high-performance, large-scale distributed systems serving millions of users
• Have experience building or operating services on at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure), with exposure to Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code or container orchestration
• Have strong interest in inference
• Thrive in cross-functional collaboration with both internal teams and external partners
• Are a fast learner who can quickly ramp up on new technologies, hardware platforms, and provider ecosystems
• Are highly autonomous and self-driven, taking ownership of problems end-to-end with a bias toward flexibility and high-impact work
• Pick up slack, even when it goes outside your job description

Strong Candidates May Also Have Experience With

• Direct experience working with CSP partner teams to scale infrastructure or products across multiple platforms, navigating differences in networking, security, privacy, billing, and managed service offerings
• A background in building platform-agnostic tooling or abstraction layers that work across cloud providers
• Hands-on experience with capacity management, cost optimization, or resource planning at scale across heterogeneous environments
• Strong familiarity with LLM inference optimization, batching, caching, and serving strategies
• Experience with Machine learning infrastructure including GPUs, TPUs, Trainium, or other AI accelerators
• Background designing and building CI/CD systems that automate deployment and validation across cloud environments
• Solid understanding of multi-region deployments, geographic routing, and global traffic management
• Proficiency in Python or Rust

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 USD

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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.  Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process