Staff+ Software Engineer, Research Systems Engineering

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

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity donation matching

Generous vacation & parental leave

Flexible working hours

Office space in SF

Job summary

Anthropic, based in San Francisco, is seeking a Principal Infrastructure Engineer to scale and secure our distributed systems used to train and serve AI models.

You will partner with Research teams to define requirements, lead multi-month projects, and mentor engineers while raising the technical bar across the Infrastructure org. This role emphasizes reliability, scalability, and security as our platforms grow.

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.
• Experience with modern cloud infrastructure (Kubernetes, AWS, GCP).
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

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: Python/Rust/Go/Java

Cloud infrastructure

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Infrastructure as code

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 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

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 aren't not 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.

Your safety matters to us.

To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

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.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues.

Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage:

Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.