Staff Engineer, Datacenter Server Lifecycle

Details

Anthropic is investing $50 billion in American computing infrastructure, including datacenters custom-built for its workloads. The Datacenter Server Lifecycle team owns the end-to-end operational journey of every machine in Anthropic's datacenters, including provisioning, deployment, steady-state operation, maintenance, repair, refresh, and decommissioning.

This is greenfield work involving the definition of services, tooling, standards, and processes for operating critical hardware at scale. The role will also help develop AI-native workflows for datacenter operations and drive improvements in efficiency, performance, and reliability. Security is a core part of the role: machines handle sensitive AI training and serving workloads, so the team must ensure that every machine is trusted, attested, and operating with a verified chain of integrity from hardware through end of life.

Responsibilities

• Build automation to support datacenter fleets at scale.
• Define and own the end-to-end system lifecycle strategy, from provisioning and deployment through operation, maintenance, refresh, and decommissioning.
• Maintain automation and operational procedures for lifecycle events such as hardware failures, firmware upgrades, and fleet rotations.
• Partner with Infrastructure Security to design and enforce trusted compute standards across the server lifecycle.
• Work with the Networking team to ensure end-to-end connectivity across all sites.
• Build and maintain tooling to track machine health, configuration, and operational status across the datacenter fleet.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience with server hardware, including rack deployment, cabling, troubleshooting, and understanding failure modes at scale.
• End-to-end understanding of hardware lifecycle management, including asset tracking, provisioning workflows, maintenance scheduling, and decommissioning practices.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language, such as Python, Rust, Go, or Java.
• Working knowledge of modern cloud infrastructure, including Kubernetes and large-scale cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to build consensus with a wide range of stakeholders.
• Comfort navigating ambiguity and making progress on complex, cross-functional problems.
• Willingness to travel occasionally to datacenter sites across North America.
• Bachelor's degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and experience in a field relevant to the role.

Preferred Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in datacenter infrastructure management or a closely related discipline.
• Hands-on experience with GPU or AI accelerator hardware, such as NVIDIA A100/H100, Google TPUs, or AWS Trainium, and an understanding of its operational demands.
• Familiarity with provisioning and operating system tooling such as LinuxBoot and NixOS.
• Experience building or contributing to datacenter automation or fleet management platforms.
• Experience building and deploying server operating system distributions across large server fleets.
• Background in large-scale capacity planning and hardware refresh strategy, ideally at a hyperscaler or large cloud provider.
• Experience with trusted compute and hardware security concepts such as secure boot, TPM, hardware attestation, and firmware verification, or a strong desire to develop expertise in this area.

Benefits

Anthropic offers competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and an office space for collaboration. 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. Staff are currently expected to work from one of the company's offices at least 25% of the time, although some roles may require more office time.