Used Tools & Technologies
Not specified
Required Skills & Competences
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.
Security @ 4
Go @ 7
Kubernetes @ 4
IaC @ 4
Terraform @ 7
Python @ 7
GCP @ 4
Distributed Systems @ 4
AWS @ 4
Azure @ 4
Networking @ 4
Rust @ 7
Atlantis @ 7
AI @ 4
- 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.
Details
Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.
Role summary
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 datacenters. Systems must provide high-bandwidth interconnectivity, be secure-by-default, and support automatic draining and recovery. As a Staff engineer on this team you will set technical direction for bringing compute online at rapid scale.
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 growth of engineers through technical mentorship and coaching
Minimum qualifications / 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
- 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
- 8+ 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
Compensation
- Annual Salary: $320,000 - $4,050,000 USD
Logistics
- Locations: San Francisco, CA; New York City, NY; Seattle, WA (United States)
- Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
- Location-based hybrid policy: staff expected to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time
- Visa sponsorship: Anthropic states they do sponsor visas and retain an immigration lawyer to help when they make an offer
Benefits
- Competitive compensation and benefits
- Optional equity donation matching
- Generous vacation and parental leave
- Flexible working hours and office space for collaboration
About Anthropic / Why we're different
Anthropic focuses on large-scale AI research as a cohesive team, valuing impact and collaboration. The company emphasizes research directions like interpretability, scaling laws, AI & compute, and learning from human preferences. Applicants are encouraged to review Anthropic's research and candidate AI guidance.