Staff+ Software Engineer, Infrastructure (Distributed Systems)

About Anthropic

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.

About the role

Anthropic’s Infrastructure organization builds and operates the distributed systems that train, serve, and secure our AI models, including data pipelines, some of the largest Kubernetes clusters in the world, along with the databases, observability, and developer tooling that every other team at Anthropic depends on. As a Staff+ Software Engineer on our Infrastructure team, you’ll independently scope and lead complex, multi-month infrastructure projects, make the architectural decisions other engineers build on, and work closely with research and product teams to understand their needs and build systems that keep pace as those needs evolve.

• Team placement happens after the interview process, based on your interests and experience alongside organizational needs. This lets us match you with the team where you’ll have the most impact.

Key responsibilities

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

Minimum qualifications

• Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or infrastructure in production
• A track record of independently scoping and delivering complex, ambiguous, multi-month technical projects
• Experience making architectural decisions that other engineers and teams build on top of
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and proficiency in at least one programming language (for example, 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, with experience driving alignment across multiple teams or stakeholders

Preferred qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, not including internships
• Experience with machine learning infrastructure, such as GPUs, TPUs, or Trainium, and associated networking infrastructure like 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

Deadline to apply: None. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.