Staff Infrastructure Engineer (Cluster Infrastructure)

• Anthropic’s Infrastructure organization is foundational to our mission of developing AI systems that are reliable, interpretable, and steerable
• The systems we build determine how quickly we can train new models, how reliably we can run safety experiments, and how effectively we can scale Claude to millions of users — demonstrating that safe, reliable infrastructure and frontier capabilities can go hand in hand
• Cluster Infra owns the full lifecycle of compute clusters at Anthropic. We build agent-driven automation for cluster provisioning and lifecycle management across all major cloud providers and our own datacenters
• Our systems stand up clusters that are interconnected with high bandwidth, secure-by-default, and able to automatically drain and recover in response to failure. As a Staff engineer on this team, you’ll set the technical direction for how Anthropic brings compute online - at a moment when the scale of that compute is growing faster than at almost any company in the world
• 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 the growth of engineers around you through technical mentorship and coaching

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents
• Inclusive fertility benefits via Carrot Fertility
• 22 weeks of paid parental leave
• Flexible paid time off and absence policies
• Mental health support for you and your dependents
• Competitive salary and equity packages
• Optional equity donation matching at a 1:1 ratio, up to 25% of your equity grant
• Retirement plans with competitive matching
• Life and income protection plans
• $500/month flexible wellness and time saver stipend
• Commuter benefits
• Annual education stipend
• Home office stipends
• Relocation support for those moving for Anthropic
• Daily meals and snacks in the office- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including time as a technical lead setting direction for a team
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, reliability, and cloud platforms (e.g., Kubernetes, IaC, AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Ability to build alignment across senior stakeholders and communicate effectively at all levels
• 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
• Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
• Experience with cluster security: pod security standards and admission control, RBAC and least-privilege IAM, node and container hardening, supply-chain/image provenance
• Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
• Deep experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Atlantis), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Argo Workflows)
• Experience with cluster and host networking: CNI (Cilium), eBPF, NetworkPolicy, multi-NIC, sFlow, service mesh (Istio/Envoy/Linkerd, mTLS)
• 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)
• Skill in quickly understanding systems design tradeoffs and keeping track of rapidly evolving software systems
• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Depth in one or more of: Kubernetes internals, cluster provisioning and management systems, cluster orchestration systems (Mesos, Borg-like)
• Experience operating large-scale compute infrastructure at hyperscale (100+ clusters, 10K+ nodes)
• We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed