Staff+ Software Engineer, Inference Velocity

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