Staff Distributed Systems Engineer

Anthropic; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 485,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a senior Infrastructure leader to design, build, and operate large-scale distributed systems that power our AI research. You will collaborate with researchers to translate their needs into reliable, scalable infrastructure, lead multi-month projects, and mentor junior engineers to raise the team's technical bar.

You will own architectural decisions, ensure security, and improve incident response and on-call practices while maintaining strong communication across multiple

Qualifications

• Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or infrastructure in production.
• Experience independently scoping and delivering complex, ambiguous, multi-month technical projects.
• Prior experience as a technical lead or mentor for other engineers.
• 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 (e.g., Python, Rust, Go, Java).
• Experience with modern cloud infrastructure (e.g., Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, AWS, GCP).
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience building alignment across multiple teams or stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Independently scope and lead complex, multi-month infrastructure projects, from an ambiguous starting point through to a production system
• Build deep partnerships with researchers and Research teams to understand their needs and deliver for them
• Mentor other engineers and help raise the technical bar for the team
• Build alignment on technical direction across multiple teams, working through ambiguous problem spaces
• Take ownership of the reliability, scalability, and security of the systems you build as usage and complexity grow
• Lead the improvement of operational processes across Infrastructure, such as incident response, postmortems, and on-call rotations, so the team learns from every incident

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Programming languages

Cloud infrastructure

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

Kubernetes

Infrastructure as code

AWS

GCP

Job description

Anthropic is seeking a senior Infrastructure leader to design, build, and operate large-scale distributed systems that power our AI research. You will collaborate with researchers to translate their needs into reliable, scalable infrastructure, lead multi-month projects, and mentor junior engineers to raise the team's technical bar.

You will own architectural decisions, ensure security, and improve incident response and on-call practices while maintaining strong communication across multiple