Staff + Senior Software Engineer, Inference

About the company the company’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 Our Inference team is responsible for building and maintaining the critical systems that serve Claude to millions of users worldwide. We bring Claude to life by serving our models via the industry's largest compute‑agnostic inference deployments. We are responsible for the entire stack from intelligent request routing to fleet‑wide orchestration across diverse AI accelerators. The team has a dual mandate: maximizing compute efficiency to serve our explosive customer growth, while enabling breakthrough research by giving our scientists the high‑performance inference infrastructure they need to develop next‑generation models. We tackle complex, distributed systems challenges across multiple accelerator families and emerging AI hardware running in multiple cloud platforms. Key responsibilities Design, build, and maintain the distributed systems that serve Claude to millions of users worldwide Develop intelligent request routing, load balancing, and traffic management systems across thousands of accelerators Maximize compute efficiency across the fleet by autoscaling and orchestrating production, research, and experimental workloads Build and operate production‑grade deployment pipelines for releasing new models to users Provide high‑performance inference infrastructure that enables researchers to develop next‑generation models Integrate new AI accelerator platforms and support inference for new model architectures Use observability data to tune and improve performance based on real‑world production workloads Minimum qualifications Significant software engineering experience, particularly with distributed systems Results‑oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact Willingness to pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!) Desire to learn more about machine learning systems and infrastructure Thrive in environments where technical excellence directly drives both business results and research breakthroughs Care about the societal impacts of your work Preferred qualifications Experience with high‑performance, large‑scale distributed systems Experience implementing and deploying machine learning systems at scale Experience with load balancing, request routing, or traffic management systems Familiarity with LLM inference optimization, batching, and caching strategies Experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure) Proficiency in Python or Rust Representative projects Designing intelligent routing algorithms that optimize request distribution across thousands of accelerators Autoscaling our compute fleet to dynamically match supply with demand across production, research, and experimental workloads Building production‑grade deployment pipelines for releasing new models to millions of users Integrating new AI accelerator platforms to maintain our hardware‑agnostic competitive advantage Contributing to new inference features (e.g., structured sampling, prompt caching) Supporting inference for new model architectures Analyzing observability data to tune performance based on real‑world production workloads Managing multi‑region deployments and geographic routing for global customers Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. 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: $320,000—$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 immigration lawyer to help with this. EEO and diversity: 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 your 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. #J-18808-Ljbffr