Inference Service Engineering Manager

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. Large, general systems of today can have significant benefits, but can also be unpredictable, unreliable, and opaque: our goal is to make progress on these issues.

 

You’ll lead the “inference service” team, which allows for fast and flexible sampling for all internal research teams and external users. This team has four critical responsibilities that all must be executed well in order for Anthropic to succeed:

 

1. Usability: Inference is the foundation of all our customer-facing applications (like Claude), as well as all of our internal research teams. You’ll need to make sure that our inference API is flexible enough for both of these use-cases, and that researchers can use it to be doing a wide variety of new experiments.

2. Reliability: Our partners are building businesses on top of Claude, and so this service needs to be highly available as we earn their trust.

3. Latency: Improving the speed at which Claude returns responses and generates additional text allows our partners to unlock entirely new use-cases and let Claude take on a wider variety of tasks.

4. Throughput: The efficiency of this service directly translates into how much total capacity we can take on, and how many users can access Claude.

As the team lead, you will:

• Prioritize the team’s work in building and improving our inference systems, in collaboration with senior engineers and other stakeholders
• Design processes (e.g. postmortem review, incident response, on-call rotations) that help the team operate effectively
• Coach and develop your reports to decide how they would like to advance in their careers and help them do so
• Run the team’s recruiting efforts through a period of rapid growth

You might enjoy this role if you…

• Believe that advanced AI systems could have a transformative effect on the world, and are interested in helping make sure that transformation goes well.
• Have an interest in large scale systems, performance engineering, and hardware.
• Are an experienced manager and enjoy practicing management as a discipline.

Requirements:

• You have at least 1 years of prior engineering management or equivalent experience
• You can come into our San Francisco office at least 25% of the time

Important skills:

• People management: Coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, career development
• Process design: Running a smooth on call rotation, incident response, postmortems, load testing, capacity planning, etc.
• Technical expertise: Quickly understanding systems design tradeoffs, keeping track of rapidly evolving software systems
• Project management: Prioritization, communicating across team/org boundaries
• Recruiting: Predicting staffing needs, designing interview loops, evaluating candidates, closing

Anthropic’s compensation package consists of three elements: salary, equity, and benefits. We are committed to pay fairness and aim for these three elements collectively to be highly competitive with market rates.

 

Salary - The expected salary range for this position is $270k - $445k.

 

Equity -  Equity will be a major component of the total compensation for this position. We aim to offer higher-than-average equity compensation for a company of our size, and communicate equity amounts at the time of offer issuance.

 

Benefits - Benefits we offer include:

- Optional equity donation matching at a 3:1 ratio, up to 50% of your equity grant.

- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and all your dependents.

- 401(k) plan with 4% matching.

- 21 weeks of paid parental leave.

- Unlimited PTO – most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more!

- Stipends for education, home office improvements, commuting, and wellness.

- Fertility benefits via Carrot.

- Daily lunches and snacks in our office.

- Relocation support for those moving to the Bay Area.

 

 

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Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

 

Hybrid policy: For this role, we prefer candidates who are able to be in our office more than 25% of the time, though we encourage you to apply even if you don’t think you will be able to do that.

 

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 effort to get you into the United States, 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 identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work.

 

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. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work 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 efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly 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, Mulitmodal 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 based 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.