Data Center Power Generation and Microgrids Engineer

Anthropic; United States; Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 405,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity donation matching

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible hours

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking an On-site Generation Engineer to design and operate behind-the-meter power systems for data-center scale workloads. You’ll own generation architecture, specify sizing, and coordinate with partners to ensure reliable energy delivery.

You will work across generation, storage, and interconnection to meet mission requirements with safety and compliance in mind. The role requires extensive hands-on experience with generation tech, microgrid control, and interconnection

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering or closely related field.
• PE licensure is valued but not required.
• Experience in power generation, microgrids and interconnection for data-center scale loads.
• Experience with on-site generation or storage for mission-critical or large industrial loads.

Responsibilities

• Own Anthropic's on-site generation architecture across the portfolio — prime-mover selection, sizing, and redundancy design.
• Define site energy expansion strategy and integration with storage or grid tie-ins.
• Characterize load profiles and coordinate with external partners for scalable solutions.
• Lead generation studies, interconnection analyses, and testing per industry standards.

Skills

Power generation

Microgrids

Energy storage

Interconnection

Education

Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering

PE licensure valued

Tools

ETAP

SKM

PSS E

PSCAD

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. The loads involved are large enough — and arrive fast enough — that utility supply alone often can't meet the need on the timeline required, and the step-load behavior of large accelerator clusters creates power-quality and ride-through demands that conventional backup-generation designs weren't built for. Anthropic's Data Center Infrastructure team is responsible for solving that problem: delivering facilities that can be energized early, ride through grid disturbances, and present a well-behaved load at the point of interconnection (POI).

Responsibilities

On-site generation engineering

Own Anthropic's behind-the-meter generation architecture across the portfolio — prime-mover selection and sizing (reciprocating engines, gas turbines, fuel cells), paralleling topology, redundancy, fuel systems, and emissions controls — and maintain the generation basis of design and technical specifications that build partners and generation providers design against

Set the day-one vs. day-N plant sizing and expansion strategy — what the plant needs on day one so it can be expanded or augmented later, and how to add units, storage, or a grid tie to a system already running

Characterize the data center load for external generation partners — step changes, ramps, oscillation, fault behavior, and non-IT load — so providers can size and tune their plant against the real duty

Model generation response against the load profile of large-scale ML training — step-load acceptance, block loading, transient frequency and voltage response, load rejection — and set the acceptance criteria (e.g., per ISO 8528-5) that generation packages are tested against

Develop temporary- and bridging-generation strategies that deliver early site energization ahead of permanent utility service, including the sequencing, protection, and controls changes needed to transition from temporary to permanent power without stranding equipment or capacity

Ensure generation designs meet NFPA 37, NFPA 110 where the plant provides emergency or legally required standby power, fuel-gas and fuel-storage codes (e.g., NFPA 54, NFPA 30), and applicable emissions requirements, and coordinate with environmental and permitting counterparts on the technical inputs to air permits

Energy storage & microgrid architecture

Size and specify battery energy storage systems for ride-through, step-load buffering, and power-quality support — including cell chemistry and enclosure selection, inverter selection (grid-forming vs. grid-following), UL 9540 listing, UL 9540A large-scale fire test data, and NFPA 855 installation requirements — and own the thermal and fire-protection interfaces

Define the site microgrid topology and operating modes — grid-parallel, islanded, and black-start — and the transition logic between them, including load-shedding schemes, resynchronization criteria, and the conditions under which the site separates from and reconnects to the utility

Specify the functional requirements for the microgrid controller — generation dispatch, set-point coordination across rotating and inverter-based sources, mode management — and drive its implementation, testing, and integration into site SCADA and the electrical power monitoring system (EPMS)

Help define the protection and control requirements for generation and storage sources so that interconnection protection, anti-islanding, and source-transfer schemes are consistent from the generator terminals through the point of interconnection

Grid interconnection & power quality

Lead the technical side of utility interconnection for sites with on-site generation or storage — interconnection applications, studies, and agreements, ISO/RTO processes, IEEE 1547/2800 compliance, and interconnection protection

Own power quality at the point of interconnection — flicker per IEEE 1453, harmonics per IEEE 519, voltage regulation, reactive-power and power-factor requirements — and design the generation, storage, and filtering mitigations needed to keep the site within its interconnection limits under real training-load behavior

Run or critically review the power-system studies that support interconnection and microgrid design — load flow, short-circuit contribution from rotating and inverter-based sources, transient stability, motor-starting and step-load studies, and electromagnetic-transient studies where inverter controls matter

Vendor diligence & delivery

Lead technical due diligence on on-site generation providers, BESS integrators, and microgrid-controller vendors — evaluating equipment and controls on engineering merit, stress-testing performance and availability guarantees, and reviewing proposed architectures against Anthropic's basis of design

Define the technical performance terms in energy-services agreements with on-site generation providers — availability, power quality, ramp, and ride-through, each with a definition, meter, test protocol, and acceptance criteria — working with energy commercial and legal counterparts

Review and disposition design packages, submittals, shop drawings, and deviation requests from generation providers and their EPCs, and hold partners to Anthropic's reliability and maintainability requirements

Support commissioning of generation, storage, and microgrid systems — witnessing factory and site acceptance tests, defining and observing integrated systems tests (islanding, resynchronization, black-start, load-step), and resolving field issues against design intent

Manage concurrent generation and microgrid scopes across multiple sites, and contribute to the continuous improvement of Anthropic's generation and interconnection design standards as the portfolio and the technology both evolve

You may be a good fit if you

Have 10+ years of engineering experience in power generation, microgrids, battery energy storage, or utility interconnection, with substantial time spent on on-site or distributed generation for mission-critical, data center, or large industrial loads, and deep hands-on delivery experience in at least one of these areas (generation, storage, microgrids, or interconnection)

Have deep hands-on experience with one or more generation technologies — reciprocating engine gensets (diesel and natural gas), gas turbines, or fuel cells — including sizing, paralleling, fuel systems, and emissions controls

Understand the thermal generation asset classes — reciprocating engines across the size range (sub-MW through 10–20 MW units), small- and medium-frame combustion turbines, and combined cycles — and how each responds to fast load changes and holds stable islanded operation

Understand battery energy storage sizing for a defined duty (ride-through, load-step buffering, peak shaving), inverter selection (grid-forming vs. grid-following), UL 9540 listing, UL 9540A test data, and NFPA 855 installation requirements

Understand microgrid architecture end to end — islanding detection and transition, resynchronization, black-start, load-shedding, and generation dispatch

Are fluent in interconnection standards and processes — IEEE 1547, IEEE 2800, utility interconnection requirements, and ISO/RTO study and queue processes

Are comfortable running or critically reviewing power-system studies — load flow, short-circuit, transient stability, and power quality — in tools such as ETAP, SKM, PSS E, PSCAD, or EasyPower

Hold a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Power Engineering, or a closely related field, or have equivalent practical experience; Professional Engineer (PE) licensure is valued but not required

Have worked directly with generation OEMs, BESS integrators, generation-as-a-service providers, or utilities, and can evaluate equipment and proposals on technical merit rather than datasheet claims

Communicate clearly with technical peers, utilities, regulators, 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

Designed or delivered battery energy storage systems at MW scale

Specified or commissioned a microgrid controller for a site that can island and resynchronize

Taken at least one large load or generation interconnection from application through agreement

HV/MV substation design experience — main one-line development, equipment specification, grounding, and layout — since on-site generation and storage tie in at the substation and the two scopes are tightly coupled

A protection-engineering background covering generation and interconnection protection — relay selection and settings, anti-islanding schemes, and coordination between on-site sources and utility protection

Experience integrating renewable generation (solar PV, wind) with storage into hybrid behind-the-meter plants

Experience on the technical side of air permitting for stationary generation (e.g., Title V, NSR/PSD, or state equivalents) and emissions-control equipment selection

Electromagnetic-transient (EMT) modeling experience in PSCAD or EMTP for inverter-based resource and microgrid-transition studies

Direct experience with data center, hyperscaler, or other large-campus microgrids, or at a generation provider, BESS integrator, or developer serving those customers

A track record of authoring generation or interconnection reference designs or standards that were adopted across multiple sites or by external partners

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

Annual Salary:

Annual Salary:
$320,000—$405,000 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.

We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

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‑Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

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. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.