Performance Engineer, Inference Systems

Anthropic · San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA · AI Research & Engineering · listed May 20, 2026

The shape of it

Seniority
Not stated
Where
Hybrid
Stated pay
$350,000 – $850,000 USD
Requirements listed
5
Length
1,270 words

In the posting’s own words

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.

What it asks for · 5

  • 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

Also a plus

  • 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

What the job covers

  • 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

Tools and skills named

Models & research
  • Inference4×
  • GPU
  • LLM
  • Machine learning
Cloud & infra
  • Observability2×
  • Distributed systems
Languages
  • Python
  • SQL
Data
  • Pandas

Words the posting leans on

  • correctness8×
  • kernel7×
  • performance7×
  • experience6×
  • latency6×
  • model5×
  • regression5×
  • systems5×
  • fleet4×
  • gap4×
  • inference4×
  • investigation4×
  • reliability4×
  • routing4×
  • serving4×
  • analysis3×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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How this page was made

An automated read of a public job posting, fetched August 25, 2026 and last changed by Anthropic on August 21, 2026. Every list above is pulled from the posting’s own sentences — nothing rewritten, nothing added, no judgment about the role or the company. Counts and seniority are read off the text by rule, so they can be wrong where the posting is unusual. The original is the only thing that binds. Openings close without warning; check the source before spending an evening on it.