Senior Staff+ Infrastructure Engineer, Cluster Infrastructure

at Anthropic

📍 New York City, United States
📍 San Francisco, United States
📍 Seattle, United States

USD 405,000-485,000 per year

SENIOR

✅ Hybrid

✅ Visa Sponsorship

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AI AWS @ 6 Atlantis @ 7 Azure BGP @ 6 Distributed Systems GCP Go @ 7 IaC @ 7 Kubernetes @ 6 Networking @ 4 Python @ 7 Rust @ 7 Security @ 4 Terraform @ 7

Details

About Anthropic

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The 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 Infrastructure organization is foundational to its mission of developing AI systems that are reliable, interpretable, and steerable. The systems built determine how quickly new models can be trained, how reliably safety experiments can be run, and how effectively Claude can be scaled to millions of users.

Cluster Infra owns the full lifecycle of compute clusters at Anthropic. The team builds agent-driven automation for cluster provisioning and lifecycle management across major cloud providers and Anthropic's own datacenters. The systems stand up clusters that are interconnected with high bandwidth, secure-by-default, and able to automatically drain and recover in response to failure. As a Staff engineer on this team, the role sets the technical direction for how Anthropic brings compute online.

Responsibilities

Own the technical strategy and roadmap for agent-driven cluster lifecycle management—provisioning, updates, and decommissioning
Partner across teams to ensure new compute capacity is ingested on time
Align with partner teams on physical build-out and leverage cloud solutions to deliver high-bandwidth inter-cluster connectivity
Collaborate with security owners to ensure clusters are provisioned secure-by-default
Define and drive strategy on cluster scalability, homogeneity and fault tolerance
Work closely with cloud providers and internal research, inference and product teams to shape long-term compute, data, and infrastructure strategy
Establish and evolve operational-excellence practices: incident response, postmortem culture and on-call health
Support the growth of engineers through technical mentorship and coaching

Minimum qualifications

Deep expertise in distributed systems, reliability, and cloud platforms (e.g., Kubernetes, IaC, AWS/GCP/Azure)
Strong proficiency in at least one systems language (e.g., Rust, Go, or Python), plus IaC proficiency with Terraform
Track record of leading complex, multi-quarter technical initiatives spanning multiple teams or systems
Ability to build alignment across senior stakeholders and communicate effectively at all levels

Preferred qualifications

12+ years of software engineering experience, including time as a technical lead setting direction for a team
Experience operating large-scale compute infrastructure at hyperscale (100+ clusters, 10K+ nodes)
Depth in one or more of:
- Kubernetes internals
- Cluster provisioning and management systems
- Cluster orchestration systems (Mesos, Borg-like)
Experience with cloud networking:
- VPC design and peering
- Shared VPC/Transit Gateway
- Cloud Interconnect/Direct Connect
- Cloud NAT
- Cross-cloud private connectivity
- BGP and route control
- Edge load balancing and DDoS mitigation (Cloud Armor / AWS Shield)
Experience with cluster and host networking:
- CNI (Cilium)
- eBPF
- NetworkPolicy
- Multi-NIC
- sFlow
- Service mesh (Istio/Envoy/Linkerd, mTLS)
Experience with cluster security:
- Pod security standards and admission control
- RBAC and least-privilege IAM
- Node and container hardening
- Supply-chain/image provenance
Deep experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Atlantis)
Workflow orchestration (Temporal, Argo Workflows)
Skill in quickly understanding systems design tradeoffs and keeping track of rapidly evolving software systems

Logistics

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently expected that all staff are in one of the offices at least 25% of the time (some roles may require more time in offices).
Visa sponsorship: They do sponsor visas, and if they make an offer they will make every reasonable effort to get a visa, retaining an immigration lawyer to help with this.

Compensation

Annual Salary: $405,000 - $485,000 USD.

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

Safety / recruitment note

Anthropic recruiters only contact candidates from @anthropic.com email addresses (and in some cases vetted recruiting agencies may identify themselves). Legitimate recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before the first day.