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Salary: USD 320,000 - 485,000 / annual
Anthropic is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to design, build, and operate the production backend systems powering Claude's safety mechanisms on the token generation path. This is a mission-critical role where every request passes through your systems, and latency directly impacts user experience.
You will own the end-to-end latency and reliability of the ML sampling path, defining and maintaining SLOs, error budgets, and incident response protocols. You'll ship changes to the hot path safely using canaried rollouts, error budget gating, and fast rollbacks while driving per-token performance optimization and cost efficiency as traffic and model complexity grow.
Key responsibilities include designing the streaming contract between the API and inference engines, leading design reviews, making latency/reliability/cost trade-off decisions with inference and research teams, and mentoring engineers across the Safeguards organization. You'll set technical direction for the sampling path and raise the operational bar for the wider team.
Ideal candidates have designed and operated high-QPS systems at global scale with production accountability (incident response, outages, postmortems). You should have strong distributed systems fundamentals (replication, consistency, failure modes, SLO management) and experience shipping broad changes to mission-critical systems (database migrations, interface changes, rewrites). Familiarity with LLM inference systems and transformer models is a plus but not required.
The role is based in San Francisco with a hybrid policy requiring at least 25% office time, though some roles may require more. Anthropic sponsors visas and encourages applications from underrepresented groups.
