# Staff+ Software Engineer, ML Sampling Path

**Company:** [Anthropic](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/anthropic)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $320k – $485k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Backend Systems, Distributed Systems, Replication, Consistency Models, Slo Management, Incident Response, Graceful Degradation, Canary Deployments, Database Migrations, Llm Inference, Transformer Models, Tail Latency
**Posted:** 2026-09-09

> Design and operate high-QPS backend systems on Claude’s token-generation path, owning latency, reliability, safe deployments, and incident response. The role requires 8+ years of software engineering experience, strong distributed-systems expertise, and production ownership of mission-critical services.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate backend systems that process every token on Claude’s generation path, including streaming contracts with APIs and inference engines.
- Own latency and reliability end to end by defining and maintaining SLOs and error budgets for added latency, time-to-first-token, and availability.
- Lead incident response and postmortem follow-through.
- Ship changes to critical hot-path systems through canaried and gradual rollouts, latency and error-budget gating, and rapid rollbacks.
- Optimize per-token performance, tail latency, and cost as traffic, models, and checks per request grow.
- Set technical direction through design reviews and latency, reliability, and cost tradeoff decisions with inference and research teams.
- Mentor engineers and raise operational standards across the safeguards organization.

## Requirements
- Experience designing, building, and operating high-QPS systems at global scale in production.
- Experience with incident response, outages, and postmortem-driven remediation.
- Strong foundation in distributed systems, including replication, consistency tradeoffs, failure modes, and SLO management under load.
- Ability to design graceful degradation for slow dependencies, dropped streams, and partially rolled-out deployments.
- Experience shipping broad changes to mission-critical systems, such as database migrations, interface changes, or rewrites.
- 8+ years of industry software engineering experience.
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience in a relevant field.

## Nice-to-haves
- Familiarity with LLM inference systems.
- Familiarity with transformer-based models.

## Compensation
- Annual salary: **$320,000–$485,000 USD**
- Competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, and flexible working hours.

## Similar jobs

- [Staff + Senior Software Engineer, Scaling](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/e788139e-a7e1-4e18-86aa-1645f2e1ef75) - Anthropic - San Francisco, CA - $320k – $485k/yr
- [Senior Staff Software Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/dee0f79b-db20-42d6-bb5c-0d4385927334) - Earnin - Mountain View, CA - $279k – $341k/yr
- [Senior Staff Software Engineer, Institutional Exchange](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/a60cae28-0009-445d-8f68-7c2072aebd3a) - Coinbase - Remote - $263k – $309k/yr
- [Staff Software Engineer, GRC](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/3a506b48-97b0-44a6-8c94-1b8de6be5ad9) - Vanta - Remote - $260k – $306k/yr
- [Senior Staff Software Engineer, Finhub](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/1951727b-0f94-41ad-a9e8-bd7a603a152d) - Coinbase - Remote - $254k – $299k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/51875859-1e83-4359-9d31-34a0b2c809d1
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/51875859-1e83-4359-9d31-34a0b2c809d1