Staff+ Software Engineer, ML Sampling Path

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

The Safeguards ML Sampling Path team builds and operates the production services that power Claude's safety systems. These services sit on the token generation path across every platform Claude runs on: every request must pass through them, and each millisecond of added latency is wait time for our users. You’ll keep p99 latency flat as traffic grows, build for robustness as dependencies time out or partially fail, and ship changes safely to a system that cannot go down

What you'll do

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.