Staff Software Engineer - Kubernetes Scale & Scheduler

Anthropic; New York (NY); On-site; USD 320,000 - 485,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The Kubernetes Platform team manages the control plane that runs our accelerator fleets across multiple clouds and datacenters, ensuring fast, correct, and highly available scheduling.

As part of the team, you will own, design, and operate the Kubernetes scheduler, scale the control plane, and collaborate with researchers, training, and cloud providers to deliver platform capabilities at scale and reliability.

Qualifications

• Significant software engineering experience building and operating production distributed systems.
• Proficiency in at least one systems language (Go, Python, Rust, or C++).
• Deep, hands-on Kubernetes experience (scheduler, controllers, apiserver, or operating large multi-tenant clusters).
• Demonstrated ability to debug complex issues across the stack, from API behavior down to node and network-level root causes.
• A track record of designing for reliability, correctness, and clear failure semantics in systems other engineers depend on.
• Strong written and verbal communication; comfort building consensus with internal stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own, operate, and extend the Kubernetes scheduler for Anthropic's accelerator fleets, including custom scheduling plugins and policies for gang scheduling, topology awareness, and preemption
• Scale the Kubernetes control plane (apiserver, etcd, controller-manager) to support clusters far beyond typical limits, and find the next bottleneck before it finds us
• Design, build, and operate core cluster services such as service discovery that every workload in the fleet depends on
• Build and maintain custom controllers, operators, and CRDs
• Partner with research, training, and inference to understand workload shapes and turn their requirements into platform capabilities
• Collaborate with cloud providers on required features and escalations
• Participate in on-call, lead incident response, and design processes (postmortems, runbooks, SLOs) that help the team avoid repeating failures

Skills

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Go/Python/C/C++

Debugging

Reliability design

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Kubernetes

etcd

apiserver

Job description

Anthropic is building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The Kubernetes Platform team manages the control plane that runs our accelerator fleets across multiple clouds and datacenters, ensuring fast, correct, and highly available scheduling.

As part of the team, you will own, design, and operate the Kubernetes scheduler, scale the control plane, and collaborate with researchers, training, and cloud providers to deliver platform capabilities at scale and reliability.