Staff+ Software Engineer, Safeguards ML Infrastructure

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 Infra team designs, builds, and operates the production infrastructure that powers Claude's safety systems. We own both the critical backend services that ensure safety on the token generation path, as well as the infrastructure that configures these systems during model provisioning for every platform Claude runs on -- 1P, Bedrock, Vertex, and beyond. We define and maintain SLOs, build the observability systems that surface problems early, and lead incident response when issues arise.

We're growing the team and looking for Software Engineers with deep experience owning production infrastructure at scale. The ideal candidate has built and operated large-scale distributed systems under real production pressure and built platforms, tooling, and infrastructure that other engineers depend on. Familiarity with ML research or transformer architectures is not required -- you will learn that on the job. What we prioritize is distributed backend systems expertise and a track record of ownership over the production environment.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and deploy backend services that are critical safety pieces on the token sampling and generation path.
• Own and operate the production serving infrastructure for those services across multiple deployment platforms (1P, AWS Bedrock, GCP Vertex).
• Define and maintain SLOs, build observability and alerting systems, and lead incident response for infrastructure on the critical path of every Claude request
• Participate in on-call and operational-duty rotations covering service incidents, model provisioning, and time-sensitive research and safety launches.
• Reduce oncall and onduty toil by building automation, tooling, and self-serve workflows that minimize manual operations. Be the first user of the systems you build, running them for real workloads yourself before other teams depend on them.
• Build and maintain a safety registry with full provenance -- tracking what is running in production, on which model, and when and by whom it was deployed.
• Implement automated post-deploy validation to ensure correctness is consistent across platforms.
• Work closely with ML researchers to productionize new safety techniques, translating experimental work into reliable, scalable production systems.
• Contribute to the long-term goal of platform-agnostic deployment tooling that brings 3P platforms to parity with 1P operational maturity.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Are proficient in Python; experience with Rust is a plus but not required.
• Have designed, built, and operated high QPS systems at global scale.
• Have a strong foundation in distributed systems: replication, consistency tradeoffs, failure modes, and SLO management under load.
• Have meaningful on-call experience for production systems, including incident response and postmortem-driven improvements.
• Have a desire to close the gap where nobody has yet raised their hand, even if it requires manually hand holding processes until automation and tooling can be built.
• Have hands-on experience deploying and operating on cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) at scale
• Approach infrastructure as a platform -- building systems and abstractions that other engineers build on, rather than point solutions for a single team's needs.

Strong candidates may have experience with:

• Have 8+ years of industry software engineering experience
• Experience building deployment and rollout systems with canary analysis, automated validation, or progressive rollout controls.
• A demonstrated history of reducing operational toil through automation, including transitioning teams from manual deployment processes to self-serve pipelines.
• Familiarity with LLM inference systems and the operational characteristics of transformer-based models.

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.

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.