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Practising for the listing Technical Program Manager, Inference. Its requirements are filled in below. When you have an answer you like, paste it with your CV in Career Mirror to see which of the job's skills it shows.

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Technical Program Manager, Inference
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

Anthropic’s Inference organization serves Claude to millions of users and enterprise customers, across our own products and the world’s largest cloud platforms, with the speed, reliability, and efficiency that frontier AI demands. The stack that makes this possible is deep and tightly coupled: accelerator kernels, an in-house inference engine that manages the entire token path for both production and research workloads, distributed routing, autoscaling, and capacity management. Every layer affects the others, often in ways that are hard to see in isolation. We build across GPUs, TPUs, and Trainium, and the complexity of building, testing, and shipping inference software grows with every platform we add.

We're looking for a Technical Program Manager to drive the programs that scale it. The work spans four closely coupled areas:

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Scaling and infrastructure. Routing, autoscaling, and capacity management for the serving fleet, and bringing new capacity online.

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Velocity. The toolchains, development environments, and CI/CD that let inference engineers build, test, and ship across every accelerator platform.

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Inference engine. The software between the accelerator kernels and the routing layer that serves every request.

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Performance. Improving throughput, latency, cost, and reliability across the stack, with correctness treated as part of performance.

This is not a status-tracking role. You'll own outcomes end to end, often where no single team is accountable for the whole picture. Much of your value comes from crossing boundaries into Research, Safeguards, Security, Compute, Infrastructure, API, and our cloud and silicon partners, and bringing back the requirements and dependencies that no team sees from inside its own space. There is little process to inherit, and we want to keep it that way: you'll build the minimum machinery the work needs and remove it when it stops helping. And because this is Anthropic, you'll have Claude as a collaborator. We expect TPMs on this team to push hard on what AI-assisted program management and fleet operations can look like.

Key responsibilities

•
Own the programs that scale Claude’s serving fleet across accelerator and cloud platforms, from early direction through delivery.

•
Drive new capacity online end to end, working across compute, infrastructure, security, networking, and inference teams so one person is accountable for the whole path.

•
Build visibility into supply, demand, and utilization with capacity and finance partners, and drive trade-offs among utilization, cost, latency, and reliability to a clear decision.

•
Lead reliability programs and large migrations without disrupting production traffic or research, and make sure incident follow-ups land in team roadmaps.

•
Drive the programs that make inference engineers faster: define the productivity metrics that matter, find the bottlenecks, and improve how software is built, tested, and released across platforms, in step with Anthropic’s central Infrastructure org.

•
Coordinate roadmaps and priorities across the production, research, and safeguards needs that depend on the same teams.

•
Track performance and efficiency work from opportunity to measured impact in production, with correctness held as a release criterion.

•
Own inference readiness for model launches alongside our launch TPMs.

Minimum qualifications

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7+ years of experience as a TPM, or in an equivalent engineering or SRE lead role, owning large multi-team infrastructure programs end to end in production distributed systems, ML infrastructure, or cloud platforms. You can speak to the outcomes in detail, including where a program slipped and what you did about it.

•
Technical fluency in large-scale serving infrastructure, including request routing and load balancing, autoscaling, capacity planning, cluster orchestration, deployment and rollout, and observability. You know enough to challenge a design, find the real risk, and add value beyond tracking.

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A working understanding of how LLM inference uses hardware (prefill and decode, batching, caching, compute versus memory bandwidth versus interconnect), or a track record of getting deep in an unfamiliar technical domain quickly.

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A track record of building program mechanisms from scratch on ambiguous, fast-moving efforts, and of retiring process that has stopped earning its keep.

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The ability to drive outcomes across organizations you don't manage, with competing priorities and unclear decision ownership. You read people and rooms well, know when to push and when to listen, and earn the trust of senior engineers and researchers.

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Strong written communication, including plans, reviews, and executive updates that many teams depend on.

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Low ego and high ownership. You do whatever the program needs, whether that is writing a script, running an incident bridge, or chasing a quota, and you care more about the outcome than about scope or credit.

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Care about Anthropic's mission and about serving frontier AI safely and reliably.

Preferred qualifications

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Direct experience with LLM or ML inference serving at scale, such as model servers, batching and scheduling, KV caching, quantization, speculative decoding, or multi-model routing.

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Experience with accelerator infrastructure (GPU, TPU, or Trainium), including cluster bring-up, hardware qualification, or running one workload across more than one accelerator platform.

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Experience managing capacity across multiple clouds or regions, including demand forecasting, headroom policy, cost modeling, or unit economics for compute-heavy services.

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Experience with developer productivity, release engineering, or CI/CD at scale, especially for hardware-dependent workloads, and with using engineering metrics to measurably raise velocity.

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Experience running performance or efficiency programs, with enough grounding in rooflines, kernels, ML compilers (XLA, Triton, Neuron), numerics, or collective communication to reason about trade-offs with the engineers doing the work.

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Familiarity with Kubernetes-based orchestration and job scheduling.

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Experience working with research teams and turning their needs into infrastructure requirements.

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Practical experience using AI tools in your own workflow, including building automations or agents, and clear ideas about where they help and where they don't.

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:
$290,000 — $435,000 USD

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

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 reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

For roles performing work in California: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records or criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.

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 think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

How we're different

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, Multimodal 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 headquartered 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. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.

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Requirements found

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What this posting asks for

Level: Manager — The title says "Manager".

Main responsibilities

Own the programs that scale Claude’s serving fleet across accelerator and cloud platforms, from early direction through delivery.
Drive new capacity online end to end, working across compute, infrastructure, security, networking, and inference teams so one person is accountable for the …
Build visibility into supply, demand, and utilization with capacity and finance partners, and drive trade-offs among utilization, cost, latency, and reliabil…
Lead reliability programs and large migrations without disrupting production traffic or research, and make sure incident follow-ups land in team roadmaps.
Drive the programs that make inference engineers faster: define the productivity metrics that matter, find the bottlenecks, and improve how software is built…
Coordinate roadmaps and priorities across the production, research, and safeguards needs that depend on the same teams.
Track performance and efficiency work from opportunity to measured impact in production, with correctness held as a release criterion.
Own inference readiness for model launches alongside our launch TPMs.
7+ years of experience as a TPM, or in an equivalent engineering or SRE lead role, owning large multi-team infrastructure programs end to end in production d…
Technical fluency in large-scale serving infrastructure, including request routing and load balancing, autoscaling, capacity planning, cluster orchestration,…

Competencies an interviewer will look for

Technical skill Core
In the posting: “We build across GPUs, TPUs, and Trainium, and the complexity of building, testing, and shipping inference software grows with every platform we add.” · “The software between the accelerator kernels and the routing layer that serves every request.” · “Much of your value comes from crossing boundaries into Research, Safeguards, Security, Compute, Infrastructure, API, and our cloud and silicon partners, and …”
Show it by: Names the tools, languages or systems used and how; Explains a technical choice and its trade-off.
Communication Core
In the posting: “Strong written communication, including plans, reviews, and executive updates that many teams depend on.” · “Experience running performance or efficiency programs, with enough grounding in rooflines, kernels, ML compilers (XLA, Triton, Neuron), numerics, or collecti…” · “If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.”
Show it by: Adapts the message to the listener; Gives an example of explaining something clearly in writing or speech.
Teamwork and collaboration Core
In the posting: “And because this is Anthropic, you'll have Claude as a collaborator.” · “In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic.” · “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.”
Show it by: Says what they did inside a team, not only what 'we' did; Shows how a disagreement was handled.
Ownership and accountability Core
In the posting: “You'll own outcomes end to end, often where no single team is accountable for the whole picture.” · “Own the programs that scale Claude’s serving fleet across accelerator and cloud platforms, from early direction through delivery.” · “Drive new capacity online end to end, working across compute, infrastructure, security, networking, and inference teams so one person is accountable for the …”
Show it by: Takes a task from start to finish without being chased; Owns a mistake and what was changed after it.
Planning and organisation Core
In the posting: “Anthropic’s Inference organization serves Claude to millions of users and enterprise customers, across our own products and the world’s largest cloud platfor…” · “Coordinate roadmaps and priorities across the production, research, and safeguards needs that depend on the same teams.” · “Technical fluency in large-scale serving infrastructure, including request routing and load balancing, autoscaling, capacity planning, cluster orchestration,…”
Show it by: Shows how priorities were set when everything was urgent; Mentions deadlines met and how.
Attention to detail and quality Core
In the posting: “We build across GPUs, TPUs, and Trainium, and the complexity of building, testing, and shipping inference software grows with every platform we add.” · “Care about Anthropic's mission and about serving frontier AI safely and reliably.” · “Your safety matters to us.”
Show it by: Gives an example of an error caught before it caused harm; Names the check or standard they used.
Stakeholder management Core
In the posting: “Much of your value comes from crossing boundaries into Research, Safeguards, Security, Compute, Infrastructure, API, and our cloud and silicon partners, and …” · “Build visibility into supply, demand, and utilization with capacity and finance partners, and drive trade-offs among utilization, cost, latency, and reliabil…” · “Strong written communication, including plans, reviews, and executive updates that many teams depend on.”
Show it by: Shows how they aligned people with different goals; Explains how they handled a 'no' from someone senior.
Data and analysis Core
In the posting: “Drive the programs that make inference engineers faster: define the productivity metrics that matter, find the bottlenecks, and improve how software is built…” · “Experience with developer productivity, release engineering, or CI/CD at scale, especially for hardware-dependent workloads, and with using engineering metri…”
Show it by: Uses a number to describe the situation or the result; Explains what the data showed and what was done with it.
Adaptability and learning Core
In the posting: “A track record of building program mechanisms from scratch on ambiguous, fast-moving efforts, and of retiring process that has stopped earning its keep.” · “We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely…”
Show it by: Describes learning something new quickly and using it; Shows a change of plan and how they adjusted.
Customer focus Supporting
In the posting: “Anthropic’s Inference organization serves Claude to millions of users and enterprise customers, across our own products and the world’s largest cloud platfor…”
Show it by: Puts the customer's need in their own words; Shows a result for the customer, not only for the company.

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Practice questions

Tell me about yourself. Dedicated step-by-step practice.
If an interviewer asks something improper How to respond to questions about age, family, origin or health.
Built from this posting (8):
Walk me through a piece of work where you used your strongest technical skill. What exactly did you do? From this posting
Tell me about a time you had to explain something complex to someone outside your field. From this posting
Describe a time you worked with another team to deliver something. What was your part? From this posting
Tell me about a task you took from start to finish without anyone asking you to. From this posting
How have you used writing in your work? Walk me through one real example. From this posting
Tell me about a problem you solved using training. From this posting
Tell me about a time you helped someone on your team get better at their work. From this posting
Describe a time you went out of your way to solve a customer's problem. From this posting
This posting reads as Software engineering: its questions come first.
Tell me about the hardest bug you have tracked down. How did you find the cause? Software engineering
Describe a technical design decision you made and the trade-off behind it. Software engineering
Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate in a code review. Software engineering
Production is down and you are the first engineer to notice. What do you do in the first 30 minutes? Software engineering
How do you decide what to test before you ship a change? Software engineering
Walk me through a feature you built from start to finish. What tools and languages did you use? Software engineering
Tell me about a time you helped a less experienced engineer get unstuck. Software engineering
Your estimate for a feature turns out to be badly wrong halfway through. What do you do? Software engineering
Two managers ask you to book the same room at the same time. What do you do?
Tell me about a sale or agreement you are proud of.
Describe a time you handled an upset customer or colleague.
Tell me about a time you had several deadlines at once. How did you decide what to do first?
Give an example of a mistake you caught before it caused a problem.
Tell me about a time you taught someone how to do something.
Describe a time you took the lead without being asked.
Tell me about a time you had to explain something complicated in simple terms.
Describe a process you improved.
Do you have any questions for us?
Why do you want to work here?
Why is there a gap in your employment? Difficult question
Why did you leave your last job? Difficult question
Why are you changing careers? Difficult question
What is your greatest weakness? Difficult question
What are your salary expectations? Difficult question
You seem overqualified for this role. Why do you want it? Difficult question
Improper-question practice: How old are you? / Do you have children? / Where are you from originally?
A customer is angry about a delay you did not cause. What do you do?
How do you keep track of many open customer requests?
Tell me about a time you could not give a customer what they wanted.
You find that the inventory count does not match the system. What do you do?
Tell me about a time a shipment or delivery went wrong.
How do you make sure safety rules are followed on a busy shift?
How have you used spreadsheets in your work?
Tell me about a time you had to enter or check a lot of data accurately.
A prospect says your price is too high. How do you respond?
How do you keep your pipeline organised?
Tell me about a technical problem you solved on your own.
You find a bug right before a release. What do you do?
Walk me through how you would check whether a report's numbers are right.