Performance Engineer, GPU

San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA

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:

Pioneering the next generation of AI requires breakthrough innovations in GPU performance and systems engineering. As a GPU Performance Engineer, you'll architect and implement the foundational systems that power Claude and push the frontiers of what's possible with large language models. You'll be responsible for maximizing GPU utilization and performance at unprecedented scale, developing cutting-edge optimizations that directly enable new model capabilities and dramatically improve inference efficiency. Working at the intersection of hardware and software, you'll implement state-of-the-art techniques from custom kernel development to distributed system architectures. Your work will span the entire stack—from low-level tensor core optimizations to orchestrating thousands of GPUs in perfect synchronization. Strong candidates will have a track record of delivering transformative GPU performance improvements in production ML systems and will be excited to shape the future of AI infrastructure alongside world-class researchers and engineers.

You might be a good fit if you:

Have deep experience with GPU programming and optimization at scale
Are impact-driven, passionate about delivering measurable performance breakthroughs
Can navigate complex systems from hardware interfaces to high-level ML frameworks
Enjoy collaborative problem-solving and pair programming
Want to work on state-of-the-art language models with real-world impact
Care about the societal impacts of your work
Thrive in ambiguous environments where you define the path forward

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

GPU Kernel Development: CUDA, Triton, CUTLASS, Flash Attention, tensor core optimization
ML Compilers & Frameworks: PyTorch/JAX internals, torch.compile, XLA, custom operators
Performance Engineering: Kernel fusion, memory bandwidth optimization, profiling with Nsight
Distributed Systems: NCCL, NVLink, collective communication, model parallelism
Low-Precision: INT8/FP8 quantization, mixed-precision techniques
Production Systems: Large-scale training infrastructure, fault tolerance, cluster orchestration

Representative projects:

Co-design attention mechanisms and algorithms for next-generation hardware architectures
Develop custom kernels for emerging quantization formats and mixed-precision techniques
Design distributed communication strategies for multi-node GPU clusters
Optimize end-to-end training and inference pipelines for frontier language models
Build performance modeling frameworks to predict and optimize GPU utilization
Implement kernel fusion strategies to minimize memory bandwidth bottlenecks
Create resilient systems for planet-scale distributed training infrastructure
Profile and eliminate performance bottlenecks in production serving infrastructure
Partner with hardware vendors to influence future accelerator capabilities and software stacks

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. The expected salary range for this position is: 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. Annual Salary: $280,000 - $850,000USD

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,... Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However,... We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification... Your safety matters to us...

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science...

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco... Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process