Demo

TPU Kernel Engineer

Anthropic
Seattle, WA Full Time
POSTED ON 12/27/2025
AVAILABLE BEFORE 2/11/2026
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

As a TPU Kernel Engineer, you'll be responsible for identifying and addressing performance issues across many different ML systems, including research, training, and inference. A significant portion of this work will involve designing and optimizing kernels for the TPU. You will also provide feedback to researchers about how model changes impact performance. Strong candidates will have a track record of solving large-scale systems problems and low-level optimization.

You May Be a Good Fit If You

  • Have significant experience optimizing ML systems for TPUs, GPUs, or other accelerators
  • Are results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
  • Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
  • Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
  • Want to learn more about machine learning research
  • Care about the societal impacts of your work

Strong Candidates May Also Have Experience With

  • High performance, large-scale ML systems
  • Designing and implementing kernels for TPUs or other ML accelerators
  • Understanding accelerators at a deep level, e.g. a background in computer architecture
  • ML framework internals
  • Language modeling with transformers

Representative Projects

  • Implement low-latency, high-throughput sampling for large language models
  • Adapt existing models for low-precision inference
  • Build quantitative models of system performance
  • Design and implement custom collective communication algorithms
  • Debug kernel performance at the assembly level

The expected base compensation for this position is below. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation.

Annual Salary

$280,000—$560,000 USD

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, 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.

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.

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

Salary : $280,000 - $560,000

If your compensation planning software is too rigid to deploy winning incentive strategies, it’s time to find an adaptable solution. Compensation Planning
Enhance your organization's compensation strategy with salary data sets that HR and team managers can use to pay your staff right. Surveys & Data Sets

What is the career path for a TPU Kernel Engineer?

Sign up to receive alerts about other jobs on the TPU Kernel Engineer career path by checking the boxes next to the positions that interest you.
Income Estimation: 
$71,493 - $96,419
Income Estimation: 
$92,369 - $122,605
Income Estimation: 
$155,477 - $213,492
Income Estimation: 
$161,172 - $205,272
Income Estimation: 
$120,254 - $158,147
Income Estimation: 
$225,010 - $318,974
Income Estimation: 
$208,337 - $274,406
Income Estimation: 
$68,606 - $89,684
Income Estimation: 
$88,975 - $120,741
Income Estimation: 
$68,121 - $81,836
Income Estimation: 
$71,928 - $87,026
Income Estimation: 
$125,958 - $157,570
Income Estimation: 
$82,813 - $108,410
Income Estimation: 
$120,989 - $162,093
Income Estimation: 
$74,806 - $91,633
Income Estimation: 
$71,928 - $87,026
Income Estimation: 
$145,337 - $174,569
Income Estimation: 
$102,775 - $137,396
Income Estimation: 
$153,127 - $203,425
Income Estimation: 
$139,626 - $193,276
Income Estimation: 
$164,650 - $211,440
Income Estimation: 
$130,030 - $173,363
View Core, Job Family, and Industry Job Skills and Competency Data for more than 15,000 Job Titles Skills Library

Job openings at Anthropic

  • Anthropic York, NY
  • 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 ... more
  • 14 Days Ago

  • Anthropic York, NY
  • 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 ... more
  • 14 Days Ago

  • Anthropic York, NY
  • 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 ... more
  • 14 Days Ago

  • Anthropic York, NY
  • 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 ... more
  • 14 Days Ago


Not the job you're looking for? Here are some other TPU Kernel Engineer jobs in the Seattle, WA area that may be a better fit.

  • Webster & Webster Associates Seattle, WA
  • Webster & Webster Associates is leading a confidential search for a Kernel Engineer on behalf of a premier software technology firm that develops core oper... more
  • 2 Months Ago

  • Lensa Seattle, WA
  • Lensa partners with DirectEmployers to promote this job for Amazon. Description Utility Computing (UC) AWS Utility Computing (UC) provides product innovati... more
  • 12 Days Ago

AI Assistant is available now!

Feel free to start your new journey!