Performance Engineer, Inference Systems

Job Application for Performance Engineer, Inference Systems at Anthropic

Performance Engineer, Inference Systems San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA

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.

Annual Salary: $350,000 - $850,000 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…