Senior Staff+ Software Engineer, Node Infra

Details

Anthropic’s Infrastructure organization is foundational to its mission of developing reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

Node Infra owns the full lifecycle of accelerator capacity at Anthropic—ingesting and provisioning compute across major CSPs and its own datacenters, standing up and scaling clusters from thousands to hundreds of thousands of hosts, and building health, diagnostics, and automated repair systems to keep every GPU, TPU, and Trainium node usable and ready to power Anthropic’s frontier AI research.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy and roadmap for node lifecycle management: ingestion, bring-up, health checking, and automated repair
• Drive cross-team initiatives to build and scale AI clusters across multiple clouds and accelerator families
• Design and operate systems that detect, isolate, and remediate unhealthy hardware automatically, improving fleet MTBI and minimizing stranded capacity
• Define infrastructure architecture so the hardest problems get solved—directly or by working through others
• Work closely with cloud providers and internal research/inference/product teams to shape long-term compute, data, and infrastructure strategy
• Establish and evolve operational excellence practices (incident response, postmortem culture, on-call)
• Support the growth of engineers through technical mentorship and coaching

Requirements

• 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
• Hands-on experience with machine learning accelerators (GPUs, TPUs, or Trainium)
• 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 experience as a technical lead setting direction for a team
• Experience managing large-scale compute infrastructure at hyperscale (10K+ nodes), including capacity management and efficiency
• Depth in one or more of:
  • Kubernetes internals (scheduler, autoscaler, kubelet, Karpenter)
  • Cluster orchestration systems (Mesos, Borg-like)
  • Node provisioning pipelines
• Low-level systems experience: kernel, virtualization, device drivers, firmware, or hardware health/diagnostics daemons
• Familiarity with high-performance networking (EFA, RDMA, InfiniBand) for distributed ML workloads
• Demonstrated ownership of production reliability for high-throughput, latency-sensitive systems
• Contributions to relevant open-source projects (Kubernetes, Linux kernel, container runtimes, etc.)
• Skill in quickly understanding systems design tradeoffs and keeping track of rapidly evolving software systems

Logistics

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience)
• Minimum education field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
• Minimum years of experience: Correlates with internal job level requirements
• Location-based hybrid policy: Staff are expected to be in one of the company’s offices at least 25% of the time (some roles may require more time in offices)
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic sponsors visas and will make reasonable efforts to get you a visa if it makes you an offer