Sr. Software Engineer, Inference in London

About the role: Our Inference team is responsible for building and maintaining the critical systems that serve Claude to millions of users worldwide. We bring Claude to life by serving our models via the industry's largest compute-agnostic inference deployments. We are responsible for the entire stack from intelligent request routing to fleet-wide orchestration across diverse AI accelerators. The team has a dual mandate: maximizing compute efficiency to serve our explosive customer growth, while enabling breakthrough research by giving our scientists the high-performance inference infrastructure they need to develop next-generation models. We tackle complex, distributed systems challenges across multiple accelerator families and emerging AI hardware running in multiple cloud platforms.

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

• Implementing and deploying machine learning systems at scale
• Load balancing, request routing, or traffic management systems
• LLM inference optimization, batching, and caching strategies
• Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP)
• Python or Rust

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have significant software engineering experience, particularly with distributed systems
• Are results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
• Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
• Want to learn more about machine learning systems and infrastructure
• Thrive in environments where technical excellence directly drives both business results and research breakthroughs
• Care about the societal impacts of your work

Representative projects across the org:

• Designing intelligent routing algorithms that optimize request distribution across thousands of accelerators
• Autoscaling our compute fleet to dynamically match supply with demand across production, research, and experimental workloads
• Building production-grade deployment pipelines for releasing new models to millions of users
• Integrating new AI accelerator platforms to maintain our hardware-agnostic competitive advantage
• Contributing to new inference features (e.g., structured sampling, prompt caching)
• Analyzing observability data to tune performance based on real-world production workloads
• Managing multi-region deployments and geographic routing for global customers

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 Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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. 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 meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications, 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 an@anthropic.com email address. 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. We value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than working 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 computer science. We are a collaborative group and 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.