Senior Manufacturing Quality Engineer, Data Center Power & Cooling

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 405,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic seeks a Senior Manufacturing Quality Engineer to own quality at the source in data center equipment manufacturing. You will qualify suppliers, define acceptance criteria, and witness factory acceptance tests to ensure complete, conforming, and installation-ready equipment.

You will drive NCR/CAPA, perform root-cause analysis with 8D/5-Why/FMEA/SPC, and collaborate with engineering and sourcing to improve supplier performance across multiple regions.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical, Mechanical, Manufacturing, or Industrial Engineering (or equivalent).
• Hands-on FAT witnessing and supplier audits experience.
• Familiarity with QMS/ERP platforms and data tools (SQL, Power BI).

Responsibilities

• Qualify suppliers and define acceptance criteria for power and cooling equipment.
• Witness FATs for electrical gear and mechanical systems, ensuring compliance.
• Own NCR and CAPA processes; lead 8D, RCA, FMEA, and SPC activities.
• Define and track supplier quality KPIs and drive continuous improvement.

Skills

Quality engineering

Supplier quality

FAT testing

8D problem solving

5-Why analysis

FMEA

SPC

Technical drawing reading

Documentation writing

Autonomy

Education

Bachelor's in Electrical/Mechanical/Manufacturing/Industrial Engineering

Tools

SQL

Power BI

QMS/ERP systems

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

Anthropic is building and securing data center capacity at an unprecedented pace, and the power and cooling equipment that goes into those sites — switchgear, UPS, generators, transformers, busway, chillers, CDUs, air handlers, pumps and piping skids — is long-lead, high-value, and unforgiving of defects. A single nonconformance discovered at site can cost weeks of schedule.

We're hiring a Senior Manufacturing Quality Engineer to own quality at the source: inside our OEMs' and integrators' factories. You will qualify suppliers, define acceptance criteria, witness factory acceptance tests, drive corrective action to closure, and make sure equipment leaves the factory complete, conforming, documented, and ready to install. You are the person who catches the problem in Ohio before it becomes a problem in Texas.

This is a hands‑on individual‑contributor role on the Compute DC Infrastructure team, partnering daily with Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, Strategic Sourcing, Construction, and Commissioning. It is not a supplier‑relationship‑management role and not a people‑management role — the emphasis is technical quality engineering at manufacturing facilities.

What You'll Do

Supplier qualification and readiness

• Lead quality qualification of new and existing suppliers of power and cooling equipment, including on‑site process audits, capability assessments, and manufacturing readiness reviews (MRRs) ahead of production release.
• Translate Anthropic engineering specifications into supplier‑facing quality requirements: inspection and test plans (ITPs), acceptance criteria, witness/hold points, and documentation deliverables.
• Partner with Strategic Sourcing to embed quality requirements, Supplier Quality Agreements, and FAT/documentation expectations into RFPs and contracts.

Factory acceptance and in‑process quality

• Plan, witness, and sign off factory acceptance tests (FATs) for electrical gear (switchgear, UPS, transformers, gensets, busway, PDUs) and mechanical systems (chillers, CDUs, CRAH/fan walls, dry coolers, pumps, piping skids), including functional, performance, and integrated‑system testing.
• Conduct in‑process and pre‑shipment inspections at supplier facilities; verify build‑to‑print conformance, workmanship, labeling, and traceability.
• Review and approve supplier test reports, quality data packages, and turnover documentation; ensure equipment ships complete and installation‑ready.

Nonconformance and corrective action

• Own the nonconformance (NCR) and deviation process for factory‑found issues; lead containment, disposition, and root‑cause analysis using 8D, 5‑Why, FMEA, and fault‑tree methods.
• Drive supplier corrective and preventive actions (CAPA) to verified closure with measurable, sustained improvement.
• Investigate field‑reported defects that trace back to manufacturing, and feed lessons learned into supplier requirements, ITPs, and future RFPs.

Metrics and continuous improvement

• Define and track supplier quality KPIs — first‑pass FAT yield, defect rate, NCR aging, on‑time documentation, supplier scorecards — and report them in quarterly supplier business reviews.
• Apply SPC and statistical analysis to supplier process data to identify systemic risk before it reaches a FAT.
• Help build the quality framework for a rapidly scaling, multi‑supplier, multi‑region equipment pipeline — templates, checklists, audit standards, and the operating rhythm around them.

Who You Are

• 6–10+ years of quality engineering, manufacturing quality, or supplier quality experience in electrical or mechanical equipment manufacturing, mission‑critical infrastructure, or a comparable regulated/high‑consequence industry.
• Hands‑on experience with at least one side of the data center equipment stack — medium/low‑voltage switchgear, UPS, generators, transformers, busway, or chillers, CDUs, air handlers, pumps — and the curiosity to come up to speed fast on the other.
• Proven record planning and witnessing FATs and conducting supplier audits, with the judgment to know when to hold a shipment and when to accept with deviation.
• Deep fluency in structured problem‑solving and quality tools: 8D, RCA, FMEA, SPC, control plans, PPAP or equivalent.
• Able to read electrical one‑lines, P&IDs, and mechanical drawings and check a build against them.
• Strong technical writing — you produce ITPs, audit reports, and NCR packages that stand on their own.
• Comfortable operating with high autonomy and ambiguity, and communicating clearly to engineers, suppliers, and leadership.
• Bachelor's degree in Electrical, Mechanical, Manufacturing, or Industrial Engineering, or equivalent experience.

Nice to Have

• Experience with hyperscale or AI data center equipment supply chains, or with OFCI (owner‑furnished, contractor‑installed) delivery models.
• Familiarity with liquid‑cooling systems (CDUs, manifolds, quick disconnects) and the cleanliness, pressure, and leak‑test regimes they require.
• Working knowledge of relevant standards: UL 891/1558/1778, IEEE C37, NEMA, AHRI 550/590, ASHRAE 90.4, ASME B31.x, ISO 9001 auditing.
• ASQ CQE/CQA, Six Sigma Green/Black Belt, or lead‑auditor certification.
• Experience standing up a supplier quality function or QMS from a small base.
• Proficiency with QMS/ERP platforms and data tools (SQL, Power BI, or similar).

Logistics

• Location: [San Francisco / hybrid — or remote US with hub access?]
• Travel: [40–60%] to supplier and integrator factories across the US and [internationally], with occasional visits to active construction sites.

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

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

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