Senior Staff+ Software Engineer, Node Infra

Details

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 Anthropic can train new models, how reliably it can run safety experiments, and how effectively it can scale Claude to millions of users.

Node Infra owns the full lifecycle of accelerator capacity at Anthropic. It ingests and provisions compute from all major CSPs and Anthropic’s own datacenters, stands up and scales clusters from thousands to hundreds of thousands of hosts, and builds health, diagnostics, and repair automation that keep every GPU, TPU, and Trainium node in the fleet 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, driving up fleet MTBI and minimizing stranded capacity
• Define infrastructure architecture, ensuring the hardest problems get solved—whether by you 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 around you 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)
• IaC proficiency with Terraform
• Hands-on experience with machine learning accelerators (GPUs, TPUs, or Trainium)
• Track record of leading complex, multi-quarter technical initiatives that span 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 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

• Annual Salary: £325,000 - £485,000 GBP
• Location-based hybrid policy: expects staff to be in one of the company offices at least 25% of the time (some roles may require more time in offices)
• Visa sponsorship: they do sponsor visas and will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa; they retain an immigration lawyer to help with this