Data Center Electrical Engineer

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity donation matching (optional)

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Office in San Francisco

Job summary

Anthropic is expanding its Data Center team in the United States to design and deploy scalable electrical infrastructure for cutting-edge AI facilities. The role covers utility interface through to rack power delivery, requiring deep expertise in high-density data center power systems and modular construction approaches.

You will collaborate with hardware, compute, supply chain, and utilities partners to optimize build schedules, ensure safety and code compliance, and drive standardization

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering or closely related field.
• Experience with data center electrical design and mission-critical facilities is preferred.
• Familiarity with NFPA 70/NEC, NFPA 70E, IEEE standards, and local utility interconnection requirements.

Responsibilities

• Lead electrical design of data center infrastructure from utility interface to rack.
• Develop and maintain electrical basis of design and technical specifications for power distribution.
• Perform short-circuit, protection coordination, arc flash, load flow, and power quality analyses.
• Review floor plans and design DC hall layouts including rack positioning and cabling.
• Drive prefabrication and modular electrical strategy with external engineering/manufacturing teams.
• Coordinate with utilities, vendors, and internal teams to ensure compliance and design robustness.
• Present findings and defend design positions to stakeholders.

Skills

Electrical design

Power distribution

Data center

Arc flash

Short-circuit analysis

Utilities liaison

Single-line diagrams

Rack layouts

Education

Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering

RPEQ or CPEng (valued)

Tools

SKM

ETAP

EasyPower

Job description

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

Training and serving frontier AI models requires compute infrastructure at a scale and density that pushes past what conventional data center designs were built to handle. Anthropic’s Data Center team is responsible for delivering that physical infrastructure — partnering with build partners, equipment manufacturers, and utilities to stand up facilities that can reliably power some of the largest accelerator clusters in the industry.

As a Data Center Electrical Engineer based in the US, you’ll lead the electrical design of our facilities across our rapidly expanding US portfolio — owning the architecture from the utility service entrance through to the rack. You’ll develop and maintain the reference designs and specifications our build partners work against, review their engineering submittals, and run the analysis needed to make confident decisions on topology, redundancy, and equipment selection. You’ll ensure the electrical architecture keeps pace with rapidly increasing rack densities and the unique load characteristics of large-scale ML training.

A central part of this role is speed-to-capacity through prefabrication and modular construction. You’ll help drive Anthropic’s offsite-manufactured electrical strategy — modular skids, e-houses, and prefabricated power assemblies — that compress schedules and reduce onsite labor. You’ll bring deep familiarity with US electrical codes and the local network and regulatory environment, and act as Anthropic’s on-the-ground electrical subject-matter expert with local utilities and interconnection/transmission operators (e.g., ISOs/RTOs), agencies having jurisdiction, vendors, and contractors. This is also a highly cross-functional role: you’ll work with our hardware and compute teams to translate accelerator requirements into electrical design criteria, and with supply chain to qualify regional equipment vendors and create optionality in a constrained market.

Responsibilities

Electrical design & engineering

• Lead the electrical design of critical data center equipment across the US portfolio, including utility interface and substation, site-wide medium-/high-voltage infrastructure, generators, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), switchgear, transformers, and grounding systems.
• Develop and maintain Anthropic’s electrical basis of design, reference architectures, and technical specifications for critical power distribution — covering switchgear, UPS systems, PDUs, busway, and rack power delivery — producing designs that meet or exceed our quality requirements while staying within budgetary targets.
• Perform and validate engineering studies including short-circuit, protection coordination, arc flash, load flow, and power quality analysis; use findings to steer design decisions and equipment selection.
• Read, interpret, and validate data center floor plans and technical drawings, and design and plan DC hall layouts for newly allocated spaces — including rack positioning, structured cabling, power distribution, and coordination with the cooling design.

Prefabrication & modular delivery

• Drive Anthropic’s prefabricated and modular electrical strategy — developing modular skids, e-houses, and prefabricated power assemblies, and partnering with external engineering and manufacturing teams to evaluate DC construction efficiency opportunities and a productization roadmap that accelerates deployment and reduces onsite labor.
• Design for offsite manufacture and onsite assembly: coordinate the interface between prefabricated components and onsite installation, and manage temporary power sequencing tied to commissioning milestones.
• Drive standardization of modular electrical designs across sites to accelerate deployment timelines while preserving flexibility for site-specific constraints and evolving hardware generations.

Partner, vendor & utility coordination

• Review and approve electrical design packages, submittals, and shop drawings from build partners and MEP consultants, ensuring designs meet capacity, reliability, and maintainability requirements; review proposed technologies and clarify design justifications.
• Work with regional vendors and manufacturers to specify the appropriate electrical equipment, and partner with supply chain to build a diversified vendor base that mitigates lead-time and single-source risk.
• Work with local utilities and interconnection/transmission operators (e.g., ISOs/RTOs) to understand and define site utility and network connection requirements, and with local agencies having jurisdiction to ensure compliance with the National Electrical Code (NFPA 70/NEC), NFPA, IEEE, and ANSI requirements, and other jurisdictional requirements.
• Present findings and proposals to internal stakeholders and DCO teams through clear reports and presentations, and defend design positions when challenged.

Delivery, construction & commissioning

• Define project scope and provide technical support for information requests prior to and during construction; coordinate and oversee the implementation of data center infrastructure with vendors, contractors, and internal teams, ensuring work follows approved designs and complies with safety, regulatory, and operational standards.
• Work with commissioning teams to test and validate the installation, operation, and performance of electrical systems; resolve field engineering issues and review test results against design intent.
• Manage concurrent projects across multiple geographies, and travel to sites for design review, electrical systems audits, engineering evaluations, and startup support alongside onsite field engineers.
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of Anthropic’s internal electrical design standards and delivery practices, and act as a leader within the global engineering group and across the internal and external teams that support our data centers.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have 10+ years of electrical engineering experience in mission-critical facilities, with substantial time spent on data center or other high-availability electrical distribution design across the project lifecycle — from concept design through construction, commissioning, and handover.
• Have deep familiarity with US electrical codes and standards — including the National Electrical Code (NFPA 70/NEC), NFPA 70E (electrical safety), IEEE standards (e.g., 1584 for arc flash), and UL/ANSI equipment standards (e.g., UL 891, UL 1558 for switchgear) — and with local utility interconnection and regulatory requirements (utility interconnection processes, ISO/RTO market rules).
• Have hands-on experience with prefabricated and modular data center electrical infrastructure — design for offsite manufacture, modular skids/e-houses, and the coordination between prefabricated components and onsite assembly.
• Hold a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field; RPEQ or CPEng registration (or eligibility) is valued but not required.
• Have hands-on experience producing and reviewing electrical construction documents, single-line diagrams, and equipment specifications, and can interpret data center schematics and technical layouts with confidence.
• Have strong knowledge of rack layout, structured cabling, power distribution, and cooling infrastructure in high-availability data center environments.
• Are fluent in power systems analysis and comfortable running or critically reviewing studies in tools such as SKM, ETAP, or EasyPower.
• Understand critical power topologies (2N, N+1, distributed redundant, block redundant) and can articulate the trade-offs between them for different reliability and cost targets.
• Have worked directly with electrical equipment manufacturers, vendors, and contractors, and can evaluate products on technical merit, not just datasheet claims.
• Communicate clearly with both technical peers and non-specialist stakeholders, and are results-oriented, with a bias toward practical solutions and a willingness to pick up work outside your core remit when the team needs it.

Strong candidates may also have

• Direct project experience delivering data centers in multiple US markets (e.g., Virginia, Texas, Arizona, Ohio, Oregon) and deep familiarity with the National Electrical Code (NFPA 70), NFPA 70E, and the IEEE color book series alongside the US standards above.
• A track record building modular prefabricated products in electrical or mechanical areas of the data center, and driving designs toward offsite manufacturing.
• Background in medium-/high-voltage distribution, on-site generation, or energy storage integration, including battery energy storage systems (BESS) and renewable generation sources.
• Exposure to liquid-cooled infrastructure and its implications for electrical room layout and load distribution.
• Prior work at a hyperscaler, colocation provider, or MEP consultancy serving large data center clients.
• Experience driving reference designs or standards adopted across multiple sites or by external partners.

Annual Salary

$1-$2 USD

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

How We're Different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Base Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues.