Performance Engineer, Inference Systems
Anthropic · San Francisco, United States +2 · 4mo ago
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 fleet serves Claude to millions of users across our own products and the world's largest cloud platforms. The stack that makes this possible is deep and tightly coupled: accelerator kernels, model servers, distributed routing, autoscaling, capacity management. Every layer affects the others, often in ways that are hard to see in isolation.
The Inference System Dynamics team is responsible for understanding that whole system and holding it to a high bar across four dimensions: throughput, latency, reliability, and correctness. We measure how the fleet performs against its theoretical performance frontier, run cross-layer investigations to explain the gaps, and own the correctness checks that make sure Claude's outputs are right, not just fast, across hardware platforms and serving configurations. We don't own the individual components. We instrument and model them, find the highest-leverage opportunities across them, and partner with the owning teams to land the wins.
You'll work across all four areas. One week that might mean tracing a tail-latency regression from request timing down through routing and batching into a kernel overhead; the next it might mean tightening a correctness eval so it catches an output regression introduced by a quantization change. We're looking for performance engineers who treat correctness as part of performance.
Key Responsibilities
- Run cross-layer performance investigations across throughput, latency, and reliability, sizing the gap between actual fleet performance and theoretical rooflines, identifying root causes, and quantifying the value of closing them
- Own and improve the correctness evaluation pipeline that validates model output quality across hardware platforms, numerics, and serving configurations, and lead the investigation when it catches a regression
- Build the observability, dashboards, and modeling tools that make throughput, latency, cost, reliability, correctness, and their interactions legible across the stack
- Partner with kernel, serving, routing, autoscaling, and capacity teams to prioritize and land the highest-impact optimizations your analysis surfaces
- Ruthlessly stack-rank a large surface area of opportunities by impact and effort, and say no to the ones that don't make the cut
Minimum Qualifications
- Hands-on performance engineering experience: profiling, roofline analysis, latency/throughput optimization, and root-cause investigation in complex production systems
- Proficiency in Python, with the ability to read, instrument, and contribute to large production codebases you didn’t write
- Solid data analysis skills (e.g. SQL, pandas, or similar) sufficient to turn raw telemetry into clear findings
- Ability to communicate quantitative results clearly in writing to influence priorities on teams you don't manage
- Genuine interest in correctness as an engineering discipline: numerics, evaluation design, regression detection
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with ML systems, especially training or inference infrastructure or general LLM serving stacks. Direct large-scale inference experience is a strong plus
- Familiarity with GPU/TPU/accelerator performance concepts (memory bandwidth, kernel overheads, quantization, collective communication). Reasoning about these matters more than having written kernels yourself
- Experience with reliability engineering for high-throughput services: autoscaling, load balancing, request routing, tail latency
- Experience with model evaluation or numerical regression-detection pipelines
- Experience building observability or telemetry for distributed systems
- Comfortable having impact through influence and evidence rather than direct ownership
Representative Projects
- Trace a 350ms latency gap on a new accelerator platform from end-to-end request timing down to a server scheduling overhead, quantify the win, and land the fix directly or with the owning team
- Redesign the correctness eval gate: determine which signals reliably catch real model-output regressions versus noise, and make it the trusted release criterion across hardware backends
- Build a FLOPs funnel that breaks down where compute actually goes across the fleet, exposing the gap between achieved throughput and kernel rooflines
- Root-cause a numerical divergence between two hardware platforms to a specific kernel change, and define the acceptance threshold going forward
- Model the latency–cost impact of changing batch-sizing and utilization targets, and turn the result into the signal the autoscaler uses in production
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.
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.
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 anthropic.com/careers 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.