Research Engineer / Performance Engineer, RL Distributed Systems

Anthropic is seeking a Research Engineer for the Distributed Systems team within RL Engineering. The role involves designing, building, and operating distributed systems that run reinforcement learning at scale, including scheduling, data movement, fault tolerance, autoscaling, and observability. The engineer will work on the current limit of the system, collaborating with researchers and performance engineers to ensure training correctness and reliability. The system changes rapidly, requiring

Strong software engineering skills in Python and at least one systems language (Rust, C++, Go). Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production. Deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals including consistency, coordination, consensus, failure modes, and recovery. Ability to reason quantitatively about throughput, latency, and resource costs. Experience debugging complex failures across many hosts. Strong written communication for design