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Staff+ Software Engineer, ML Sampling Path

Anthropic· Safeguards (Trust & Safety)
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Hybrid (San Francisco, CA)$320k - $485kfull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Staff+ software engineer role focusing on the backend systems that power Claude's safety sampling path, responsible for end-to-end latency, reliability, and technical direction of production services on the ML sampling path.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and operate the backend systems that process every token on the generation path for Claude requests, including the streaming contract with the API and inference engines.
  • Own latency and reliability end to end: define and maintain SLOs and error budgets for added latency, time-to-first-token, and availability, and lead incident response and postmortem follow-through.
  • Ship changes to the hot path rapidly but safely — canaried and gradual rollouts, error budget and latency gating, fast rollbacks — and drive per-token performance: chase tail latency and keep cost flat as traffic, models, and checks per request grow.
  • Set technical direction for the sampling path: lead design reviews, make latency, reliability, and cost trade-off calls with the inference and research teams, mentor engineers, and raise the operational bar for the wider Safeguards organization.

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of industry software engineering experience.
  • Familiarity with LLM inference systems and transformer-based models (not required, but a plus).
  • Have designed, built, and operated high QPS systems at global scale, and were accountable for them in production: incident response, outages, and postmortem-driven remediation.
  • A strong foundation in distributed systems: replication, consistency tradeoffs, failure modes, and SLO management under load.
  • Design systems for graceful degradation and predictable failure modes.
  • Have successfully shipped broad or all-encompassing changes to mission critical systems (e.g., database migrations, interface changes, rewrites).

Skills

Required:Backend systems designLatency and reliability engineeringDistributed systemsCanary deployments / feature flagsCollaboration with ML inference teams

Benefits

  • Competitive compensation and benefits
  • Optional equity donation matching
  • Generous vacation and parental leave
  • Flexible working hours
  • Lovely office space
Last updated Sep 16, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Anthropic

building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

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