Hardware Lab Manager

Anthropic; New York (NY); On-site; USD 320,000 - 405,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

Anthropic Limited is seeking a hands-on Hardware Lab Manager to own and scale our Bay Area labs. You will manage racks, power, cooling, cabling, and inventory, ensuring labs are ready for diverse AI hardware deployments.

You\'ll work with vendors, contractors, and internal teams to forecast needs, lead procurement, and develop playbooks enabling remote teams to operate labs efficiently.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience running a hardware or datacenter lab.
• Experience with server hardware management planes (BMC/IPMI/Redfish).
• Ability to work with vendors and contractors; manage quotes and logistics.
• Strong communication and ability to work independently.

Responsibilities

• Run and scale hardware labs across sites; manage racks, power, cooling, and cabling.
• Bring up new servers and accelerators; perform firmware and OS provisioning.
• Own procurement and inventory for lab hardware; manage RMA processes.
• Develop playbooks and tooling for remote teams to operate labs.

Skills

Hardware lab operations

Lab management

Linux administration

Networking basics

Vendor management

Power tooling & cabling

Independent work ethic

Clear communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field

Equivalent combination of education and experience

Tools

BMC/IPMI/Redfish

BIOS/UEFI

PXE/Network boot

Firmware updates

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 Team

Foragers is a new Field Services team within our physical infrastructure organization. We're the boots on the ground for Anthropic's physical infrastructure: the people who get hardware into racks, gear commissioned, and sites handed over. The team is being stood up now, so early hires shape how we operate. This role is the lab-focused counterpart to our traveling field engineers. Instead of covering sites across the country, you own our Bay Area hardware labs from end to end.

About The Role

Your mission is to ensure our hardware labs are functional, useful, and ready to support the growing number of teams and projects that need access to physical hardware. You’d own what shows up, how it’s powered, cooled, cabled, tracked, set up, and made functional. This includes both standard hardware (think typical accelerator setups) and more specialized ones like ensuring our security teams have access to all the right headers and other hardware instrumentation on the machines.

Understanding and anticipating the needs of the various teams that rely on the labs will be another critical part of this role. You’ll be expected to take a lot of ownership and initiative over the lab and what’s in it, including reaching out to partner teams to figure out what they’d need in the future and making sure it’s there before it starts to block them. This will require you to collaborate closely with those partner teams, so a breadth of knowledge around hardware is extremely useful.

You’d be the first dedicated lab manager, so part of this role will include shaping it to scale from our current lab to much larger ones.

What You’ll Do

• Run the physical lab across both sites: receiving and staging, rack-and-stack, cabling, power distribution and load planning, cooling, floor layout
• Bring up new server and accelerator platforms as they arrive, from crate to a machine someone can SSH into: firmware and BIOS/UEFI setup, out-of-band management, OS install, network provisioning
• Own hardware procurement for the lab: work with teams on what's coming, order ahead of need, chase quotes and lead times, keep receiving and inventory in order
• Own RMA processes end-to-end for lab hardware: triage, swap, ship, track, close; drive vendor escalations
• Build the one-off setups engineers ask for: debug and programming harnesses (JTAG/SWD/UART), remote power switching, console and KVM access, and the occasional improvised fix for hardware running outside the conditions it was designed for
• Oversee smarthands and contractor work on-site (electricians, cabling crews, riggers, integrators, OEM field engineers): scope it, dispatch it, validate the quality
• Handle physical access, asset auditing, and lifecycle tracking for hardware that is expensive and sometimes pre-release
• Write it down: build the playbooks and lightweight tooling (inventory, remote power, console access) so remote teams can use the lab without pinging you for every step

Who You Are

• Hands-on experience running a hardware, systems, or datacenter lab, or a similar physical compute environment: rack-and-stack, copper and fiber cabling, power distribution (PDUs, circuits, phase balancing)
• Working knowledge of server hardware and its management plane: BMC/IPMI/Redfish, BIOS/UEFI configuration, serial console, PXE/network boot, firmware updates
• Enough Linux and networking (VLANs, DHCP, DNS, basic switch config) to take a bare machine to a state a remote engineer can use
• Have managed vendors, contractors, quotes, and freight for physical equipment
• Comfortable and safe with power tools, bench power supplies, and a wiring or rack elevation diagram
• Work independently with minimal supervision , and know when to ask
• Bias toward action and comfort with ambiguity: you'd rather move and adjust than wait for perfect information
• Communicate clearly and directly, especially when flagging risks or blockers

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Stood up a lab or datacenter room from empty: layout, power and cooling budget, first round of purchasing
• Time around high-density accelerator systems (GPU/TPU-class racks), liquid cooling, or pre-release/NPI hardware bring-up
• Electronics bench skills: soldering and rework, scope and multimeter, custom cable and debug harnesses, JTAG probes, light fabrication (3D printing, drilling, mounting)
• Supported hardware security, firmware, or platform bring-up work
• Experience with DCIM or asset-management tooling (NetBox, ServiceNow, etc.)
• Bought hard-to-source or specialty hardware and dealt with the compliance and logistics that come with it

Location

This role is based in our San Francisco office (500 Howard St). Travel to nearby lab spaces is required so expect to be in-office more frequently than Anthropic's standard 25% hybrid baseline.

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary

$320,000—$405,000 USD

Logistics

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

A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

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

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.

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.

Your safety matters to us.

To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

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.