Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure (Distributed Systems)

Details

Anthropic’s Infrastructure organization builds and operates the distributed systems that train, serve, and secure its AI models, including data pipelines, large-scale Kubernetes clusters, databases, observability systems, and developer tooling.

The Staff Software Engineer will scope and lead complex, multi-month infrastructure projects, make architectural decisions, and work with research and product teams to build reliable systems that scale with changing needs. Team placement occurs after the interview process based on the candidate’s interests and experience alongside organizational needs.

Responsibilities

• Independently scope and lead complex, multi-month infrastructure projects from an ambiguous starting point through to production.
• Make architectural decisions that shape the foundation other engineers and teams build on.
• Drive alignment on technical direction across teams and ambiguous problem spaces.
• Partner with research and product teams to understand infrastructure and compute needs and turn them into technical designs.
• Own the reliability, scalability, and security of systems as usage and complexity grow.
• Set technical strategy and standards for team infrastructure.
• Build and improve operational processes such as incident response, postmortems, and on-call rotations.
• Mentor other engineers and help raise the technical bar.

Requirements

• Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or infrastructure in production.
• A history of independently scoping and delivering complex, ambiguous, multi-month technical projects.
• Experience making architectural decisions that other engineers and teams build on.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and proficiency in at least one programming language, such as Python, Rust, Go, or Java.
• Experience with modern cloud infrastructure, including Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code, on AWS and/or GCP.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including experience driving alignment across teams or stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience in a field relevant to the role.
• Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements.

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, excluding internships.
• Experience with machine learning infrastructure such as GPUs, TPUs, or Trainium, and associated networking such as NCCL.
• Low-level systems experience, such as Linux kernel tuning or eBPF.
• Background in security or privacy engineering best practices.
• Prior experience as a technical lead or mentor for other engineers.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits.
• Optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Flexible working hours.
• Office space for collaboration.

Work Arrangement And Visa

• Hybrid policy: staff are expected to work from one of Anthropic’s offices at least 25% of the time, although some roles may require more office time.
• Anthropic sponsors visas and makes reasonable efforts to obtain visas for successful candidates, with support from an immigration lawyer.