Staff+ Software Engineer, ML Inference Path

About the Position

Staff+ Software Engineer, ML Inference Path

San Francisco, CA

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

The Safeguards ML Inference Path team designs, builds, and operates the production infrastructure that powers Claude's ML based safety systems. We collaborate closely with safety researchers and inference engineers to bring new classifiers and novel classes of ML defenses to production. We own the research → production transfer of new safety technologies that is on the critical path for every Claude model launch. And we build for scale: serving thousands of ML classifiers, for all requests on the token generation path, and for every platform Claude runs on -- 1P, Bedrock, Vertex, and beyond.

We’re growing the team and looking for engineers who have deep expertise in productionizing ML systems. You'll work at the intersection of machine learning, large-scale distributed systems, and AI safety, developing the platforms and tools that enable our safeguards to operate reliably at scale. And your tooling and infrastructure will be used for every model launch, which are becoming more complex, and more frequent.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable ML infrastructure to support real-time safety deployments across our classifier and model ecosystem
• Build monitoring and observability tools to track classifier performance, data quality, and system health for safety-critical applications
• Collaborate with research teams to productionize safety research, translating experimental safety techniques into robust, scalable systems
• Optimize inference latency and throughput for real-time safety evaluations while maintaining high reliability standards
• Implement automated testing, deployment, and rollback systems for ML models in production safety applications
• Partner with Safeguards, Security, and Alignment teams to understand requirements and deliver infrastructure that meets safety and production needs
• Contribute to the development of internal tools and frameworks that accelerate safety research and deployment

Requirements

• Proficient in Python and experienced with ML frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX
• Understand distributed systems principles and have built systems that handle high-throughput, low-latency workloads
• Have built automated or self-service deployment pipelines and evaluation infrastructure allowing researchers to roll out classifiers and models independently
• Have implemented A/B testing frameworks and experimentation infrastructure for ML systems
• Results-oriented, with a bias towards reliability and impact in safety-critical systems
• Enjoy collaborating with researchers and translating cutting-edge research into production systems
• Care deeply about AI safety and the societal impacts of your work

Nice to Have

• 5+ years of experience building production ML infrastructure, ideally in safety-critical domains like fraud detection, content moderation, or risk assessment
• Working with large language models and modern transformer architectures
• Developing monitoring and alerting systems for ML model performance and data drift
• Experience in trust & safety, fraud prevention, or content moderation domains
• Knowledge of privacy-preserving ML techniques and compliance requirements

We Offer

• Competitive compensation: $320,000-$485,000 USD annually
• 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.

About the Company

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.

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.