Software Engineer, Inference Deployment

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

Our mandate is to make inference deployment boring and unattended.

Anthropic serves Claude to millions of users across GPUs, TPUs, and Trainium — and every model update must reach production safely, quickly, and without disrupting service. We're building the systems that make inference deployment continuous and unattended.

As a Software Engineer on the Launch Engineering team, you'll design and build the deployment infrastructure that moves inference code from merge to production. This is a resource-constrained optimization problem at its core: validation and deployment consume the same accelerator chips that serve customer traffic — your deploys compete with live user requests for the same hardware. Every model brings different fleet sizes, startup times, and correctness requirements, so the system must adapt continuously. You'll build systems that navigate these constraints — orchestrating validation, scheduling deployments intelligently, and driving down cycle time from merge to production.

If you've built deployment systems at scale and gravitate toward the hardest problems at the intersection of automation and resource management, this team will give you an outsized scope to work on them.

Responsibilities

• Own deployment orchestration that continuously moves validated inference builds into production across GPU, TPU, and Trainium fleets, unattended under normal conditions


• Improve capacity-aware deployment scheduling to maximize deployment throughput against constrained accelerator budgets and variable fleet sizes


• Extend deployment observability — dashboards and tooling that answer "what code is running in production," "where is my commit," and "what validation passed for this deploy"


• Drive down cycle time from code merge to production with pipeline architectures that minimize serial dependencies and maximize parallelism


• Optimize fleet rollout strategies for large-scale deployments across thousands of GPU, TPU, and Trainium chips, minimizing disruption to serving capacity


• Evolve self-service model onboarding so that new models can be added to the continuous deployment pipeline without Launch Engineering involvement


• Partner across the Inference organization with teams owning validation, autoscaling, and model routing to integrate deployment automation with their systems

You May Be a Good Fit If You Have

• 5+ years of experience building deployment, release, or delivery infrastructure at scale


• Strong software engineering skills with experience designing systems that manage complex state machines and multi-stage pipelines


• Experience with deployment systems where resource constraints shape the design — whether that's fleet capacity, network bandwidth, hardware availability, or coordinated rollout windows


• A track record of building automation that measurably improves deployment velocity and reliability


• Proficiency with Kubernetes-based deployments, rolling update mechanics, and container orchestration


• Comfort working across the stack — from backend services and databases to CLI tools and web UIs


• Strong communication skills and the ability to work closely with oncall engineers, model teams, and infrastructure partners

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Experience with ML inference or training infrastructure deployment, particularly across multiple accelerator types (GPU, TPU, Trainium)


• Background in capacity planning or resource-constrained scheduling (e.g., bin-packing, fleet management, job scheduling with hardware affinity)


• Experience with progressive delivery in systems with long validation cycles: canary/soak testing, blue-green deployments, traffic shifting, automated rollback


• Experience at companies with large-scale release engineering challenges (mobile release trains, monorepo deployments, multi-datacenter rollouts)


• Experience with Python and/or Rust in production systems

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

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 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