Staff+ Software Engineer, Research Systems Engineering

EngineersOfAI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 485,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic’s Infrastructure organization builds the distributed systems that train, serve, and secure our AI models. In this role, you'll work directly with our Research teams to build reliable, scalable infrastructure that supports rapid growth.

You'll mentor engineers, lead multi-month projects, and take ownership of reliability, scalability, and security as usage expands. A strong background in large-scale systems and cloud infrastructure is essential.

Qualifications

• Design, build, and operate large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Lead complex multi-month technical projects with autonomy.
• Mentor engineers and raise the team's technical bar.
• Make architectural decisions used by multiple teams.
• Strong software fundamentals; proficient in Python/Go/Java.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP).
• Excellent written and verbal communication across teams.

Responsibilities

• Independently scope and lead complex, multi-month infrastructure projects from conception to production.
• Build partnerships with researchers to understand needs and deliver effective solutions.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar for the team.
• Align technical direction across multiple teams in ambiguous spaces.
• Own reliability, scalability, and security as usage grows.
• Improve operational processes such as incident response and on-call rotations.

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Mentoring

Architectural decisions

Programming languages

Cloud infrastructure

Kubernetes

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field

Tools

AWS

GCP

Terraform

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 builds and operates the distributed systems that train, serve, and secure our AI models. Every other team at Anthropic depends on these systems.

In this role, you'll work directly with our Research teams to build the reliable, scalable, performant infrastructure our research depends on. This is a cross-functional systems team: you'll scope and lead complex, multi-month infrastructure projects and resolve the performance and scalability bottlenecks that limit how fast we can grow.

Key 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

Minimum 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

Preferred qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, not including internships
• Experience with machine learning infrastructure (e.g., GPUs, TPUs, Trainium) and associated networking infrastructure (e.g., NCCL)
• Low-level systems experience (e.g., Linux kernel tuning, eBPF)
• Experience applying security or privacy engineering best practices

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 — $485,000 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