Senior Staff+ Software Engineer, Kubernetes Platform

Details

Anthropic operates one of the industry's largest AI compute fleets across multiple cloud providers and datacenters. The Kubernetes Platform team owns the control plane supporting these fleets, including the scheduler, Kubernetes control plane components, and core cluster services.

The team works at a scale where standard Kubernetes defaults are insufficient. Responsibilities include placing topology-sensitive machine learning workloads across thousands of accelerators, scaling apiserver, etcd, and controllers, and ensuring that core services remain fast, correct, and highly available.

Responsibilities

• Own, operate, and extend the Kubernetes scheduler for accelerator fleets, including custom scheduling plugins and policies for gang scheduling, topology awareness, and preemption.
• Scale the Kubernetes control plane, including apiserver, etcd, and controller-manager, to support clusters far beyond typical limits.
• Identify performance bottlenecks proactively.
• Design, build, and operate core cluster services such as service discovery.
• Build and maintain custom controllers, operators, and CRDs.
• Partner with research, training, and inference teams to understand workload requirements and develop platform capabilities.
• Collaborate with cloud providers on required features and escalations.
• Participate in on-call and lead incident response.
• Develop postmortems, runbooks, and SLOs to improve reliability and prevent recurring failures.

Requirements

• Significant software engineering experience building and operating production distributed systems.
• Proficiency in at least one systems-appropriate language, such as Go, Python, Rust, or C++.
• Deep, hands-on Kubernetes experience, including experience with the scheduler, controllers, apiserver, or large multi-tenant clusters.
• Ability to debug complex issues across the stack, from API behavior to node- and network-level root causes.
• Experience designing systems for reliability, correctness, and clear failure semantics.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to build consensus with internal stakeholders.
• Bachelor's degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and experience.
• Relevant field of study demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Kubernetes internals or contributions, including kube-scheduler, the scheduling framework, apiserver, etcd, client-go, or controller-runtime.
• Experience building or operating cluster schedulers or batch systems such as Kueue, Volcano, Slurm, or equivalent systems.
• Experience scaling control planes or coordination systems such as etcd, ZooKeeper, or Consul, or large DNS and service-mesh deployments.
• Familiarity with machine learning infrastructure, including GPUs, TPUs, Trainium, gang scheduling, topology-aware placement, and collective networking such as NCCL.
• Experience with GCP and/or AWS, including GKE or EKS internals and infrastructure as code.
• Low-level systems experience, such as Linux kernel tuning, cgroups, or eBPF.
• 12 or more years of relevant industry experience, including experience leading large, ambiguous infrastructure projects.

Compensation

The annual salary range is £325,000–£485,000 GBP.

Work Policy and Benefits

Anthropic currently expects staff to work from one of its offices at least 25% of the time, although some roles may require more office attendance. The company offers competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and office-based collaboration spaces.

Anthropic sponsors visas and states that it will make every reasonable effort to obtain a visa for candidates who receive an offer, with support from an immigration lawyer.