Staff+ Site Reliability Engineer, Safeguards ML Infra

Title: Staff+ Site Reliability Engineer, Safeguards ML Infra Location: Remote-Friendly (Travel-Required) | San Francisco, CA | Seattle, WA | New York City, NY

About the role:

The Safeguards ML Infra team designs, builds, and operates the production infrastructure that powers Claude's safety systems. We own the critical backend services that ensure safety on the token generation path, and we own the operational work of getting those systems safely into production: standing up safeguards for every new model launch, and deploying new safety classifiers as they ship. Every frontier model release runs through this team – we configure, verify, and roll out safeguards across every platform Claude runs on (1P, AWS Bedrock, GCP Vertex, etc.), and we lead incident response when issues arise.

This role sits at the center of that operational work. You'll ensure safeguards are properly configured and deployed for model launches and own the off-cycle deployment of new safety classifiers — canarying changes, verifying that the right safeguards are provably live on the right models, and holding rollback authority when something looks wrong. Every launch should also shrink the checklist, and the manual verifications should evolve into a system that runs itself. You'll turn launch runbooks into tooling, hand-built checks into continuous validation, and one-off deploys into a repeatable pipeline.

We're looking for engineers with deep experience in production change management at scale — people who have owned deploy pipelines, config management systems, rollout safety, or launch readiness for systems under real production pressure. Familiarity with ML research or transformer architectures is not required — you will learn that on the job. What we prioritize is production judgment: a track record of shipping changes to critical systems safely, and of automating yourself out of the work you did last quarter.

What you'll do:

• Launch captain model releases: stand up, configure, and verify safeguards for every new model, and serve as the safeguards point of contact in the launch room during release windows.
• Own the off-cycle deployment of new safety classifiers as they ship from research — canarying rollouts, running post-deploy validations, and investigating discrepancies when something looks wrong.
• Verify that the right safeguards are provably live on the right models across every deployment platform (1P, AWS Bedrock, GCP Vertex, etc.), and detect and eliminate configuration drift between them.
• Automate yourself out of last quarter's work: turn launch runbooks into tooling, hand-built checks into continuous validation, and one-off deploys into a repeatable pipeline.
• Plan to use Claude aggressively to do this! And be a trailblazer that paves the path for safe agentic operations of safety-critical systems.
• Build and maintain a safeguards registry with full provenance — what is running in production, on which model, on which platform, and when and by whom it was deployed.
• Participate in on-call and operational-duty rotations covering service incidents, model provisioning, and time-sensitive research and safety launches.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have owned production change management at scale — deploy pipelines, config management systems, canary analysis — and have strong opinions about what "verified" means.
• Have run high-stakes releases: served as a launch captain, incident commander, or release owner for systems where a bad deploy has real consequences, and are energized rather than drained by being in the critical path.
• Have meaningful on-call experience for production systems, including incident response and postmortem-driven improvements — and a track record of turning (and fixing!) postmortem action items into process and tooling changes.
• Have a desire to close the gap where nobody has yet raised their hand, even if it requires manually hand-holding processes until automation and tooling can be built.
• Have hands-on experience deploying and operating on cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) at scale.
• Are proficient in Python; experience with Rust is a plus but not required.

Strong candidates may also have:

• 8+ years of industry software engineering or site reliability engineering experience.
• A demonstrated history of reducing operational toil through automation, including transitioning teams from manual deployment processes to self-serve pipelines.
• Experience running launch or production-readiness review processes across multiple teams.
• Familiarity with LLM inference systems and the operational characteristics of transformer-based models.