Staff+ Software Engineer, Inference Velocity

Role details

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 Anthropic's Inference organization 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. We're looking for a Staff engineer to be the technical lead for Inference Developer Productivity: the team that makes every engineer in the org dramatically more effective at building, testing, and shipping inference software. This is a senior IC role with broad technical ownership. You'll set technical direction for the team's toolchains, workflows, and feedback loops, and you'll be the one making the hard calls on architecture, prioritization, and tradeoffs across heterogeneous accelerator platforms. You'll pair with the team's Engineering Manager, who owns hiring and people development, while you own the technical roadmap and drive the work. You'll also partner closely with Anthropic's central Infrastructure org, where company-wide developer productivity lives, to make sure Inference's multi-accelerator reality is well served without duplicating effort. This role is for someone who has been the technical anchor on a platform or infrastructure team before, who thinks in systems and feedback loops, and who gets real satisfaction from the moment another engineer stops fighting their environment and starts shipping. Key responsibilities Set technical direction for Inference Developer Productivity, owning the architecture and roadmap for toolchains, dev environments, and CI/CD across GPU (CUDA), TPU, and Trainium platforms Be the technical owner of accelerator toolchain management: compilers, drivers, libraries, frameworks, kept current, compatible, and well-tested so Inference engineers focus on model serving instead of environment archaeology Design and build infrastructure for efficient accelerator usage during development, including devbox environments, pre- and post-land validation automation, and shared tooling that reduces the cost of working across heterogeneous hardware Define and instrument productivity metrics for the Inference org, building the dashboards and alerting that surface regressions early (smoke tests red for extended periods, build times creeping up, toolchain breakages) and drive them to resolution Proactively hunt down bottlenecks, toil, and friction across Inference engineering workflows, then design and build the systems that eliminate them Act as the technical counterpart to Anthropic's central Infrastructure org, aligning on shared developer productivity initiatives, contributing Inference-specific 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 Minimum qualifications 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time as the technical lead or anchor on an infrastructure, platform, or developer productivity team Deep background in systems engineering, build/test infrastructure, or ML infrastructure, with the ability to go hands-on with toolchain issues, CI/CD pipelines, and developer workflow optimization Experience owning toolchains or development environments for compute-intensive workloads (ML training or inference, HPC, large-scale distributed systems) Real depth in at least one accelerator ecosystem (CUDA/GPU, TPU, or Trainium/AWS Neuron) and genuine appetite to learn the others A track record of defining and using engineering metrics to drive improvement: you've built dashboards, set SLOs on developer workflows, or led initiatives that measurably improved engineering velocity 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 Preferred qualifications Experience with ML compiler toolchains (XLA, Triton, NeuronX) or accelerator driver/firmware management at scale Background building or running shared development environments (devboxes, remote development, ephemeral environments) for hardware-dependent workflows 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 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: $405,000 - $485,000 USD Logistics Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position 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