Staff+ Infrastructure Engineer, Cluster Infrastructure

Anthropic; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 320,000 - 405,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation and benefits

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Optional equity donation matching

Job summary

Anthropic is hiring a Staff Engineer in Seattle to lead the technical strategy for agent-driven cluster lifecycle management. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems and cloud platforms, as well as proficiency in programming languages like Rust or Python. The successful candidate will work closely with various teams to ensure high-bandwidth inter-cluster connectivity and scalable infrastructure. The position offers a competitive salary and benefits, including flexible working hours.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in distributed systems and cloud platforms.
• Strong proficiency in at least one systems programming language.
• Track record of leading complex technical initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy for cluster lifecycle management.
• Collaborate with teams to ensure timely capacity ingestion.
• Establish operational-excellence practices for incident response.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud platforms (Kubernetes, IaC, AWS/GCP/Azure)

Systems programming languages (Rust, Go, Python)

Infrastructure as Code proficiency (Terraform)

Education

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

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's Infrastructure organization is foundational to our mission of developing AI systems that are reliable, interpretable, and steerable. The systems we build determine how quickly we can train new models, how reliably we can run safety experiments, and how effectively we can scale Claude to millions of users — demonstrating that safe, reliable infrastructure and frontier capabilities can go hand in hand.

Cluster Infra owns the full lifecycle of compute clusters at Anthropic. We build agent-driven automation for cluster provisioning and lifecycle management across all major cloud providers and our own datacenters. Our systems stand up clusters that are interconnected with high bandwidth, secure-by-default, and able to automatically drain and recover in response to failure. As a Staff engineer on this team, you'll set the technical direction for how Anthropic brings compute online - at a moment when the scale of that compute is growing faster than at almost any company in the world.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy and roadmap for agent-driven cluster lifecycle management - provisioning, updates and decommissioning
• Partner across teams to ensure new compute capacity is ingested on time
• Align with partner teams on physical build-out and leverage cloud solutions to deliver high-bandwidth inter-cluster connectivity
• Collaborate with security owners to ensure clusters are provisioned secure-by-default
• Define and drive strategy on cluster scalability, homogeneity and fault tolerance
• Work closely with cloud providers and internal research, inference and product teams to shape long-term compute, data, and infrastructure strategy
• Establish and evolve operational-excellence practices: incident response, postmortem culture and on-call health
• Support the growth of engineers around you through technical mentorship and coaching

Minimum Qualifications

• Deep expertise in distributed systems, reliability, and cloud platforms (e.g., Kubernetes, IaC, AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Strong proficiency in at least one systems language (e.g., Rust, Go, or Python), IaC proficiency with Terraform.
• Track record of leading complex, multi-quarter technical initiatives spanning multiple teams or systems
• Ability to build alignment across senior stakeholders and communicate effectively at all levels

Preferred Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including time as a technical lead setting direction for a team
• Experience operating large-scale compute infrastructure at hyperscale (100+ clusters, 10K+ nodes)
• Depth in one or more of: Kubernetes internals, cluster provisioning and management systems, cluster orchestration systems (Mesos, Borg-like)
• Experience with cloud networking: VPC design and peering, Shared VPC/Transit Gateway, Cloud Interconnect/Direct Connect, Cloud NAT, cross-cloud private connectivity, BGP and route control, edge load balancing and DDoS mitigation (Cloud Armor / AWS Shield)
• Experience with cluster and host networking: CNI (Cilium), eBPF, NetworkPolicy, multi-NIC, sFlow, service mesh (Istio/Envoy/Linkerd, mTLS)
• Experience with cluster security: pod security standards and admission control, RBAC and least-privilege IAM, node and container hardening, supply-chain/image provenance
• Deep experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Atlantis), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Argo Workflows)
• Skill in quickly understanding systems design tradeoffs and keeping track of rapidly evolving software systems

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.
• Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas, but this can vary by role and candidate.

Benefits

We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space.