Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure (Distributed Systems)

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. That includes data pipelines, some of the largest Kubernetes clusters in the world, and the databases, observability, and developer tooling that every other team at Anthropic depends on.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Infrastructure team, you'll scope and lead complex, multi-month infrastructure projects, make the architectural decisions other engineers build on, and work with research and product teams to build systems that keep pace as their needs change.

Team placement happens after the interview process, based on your interests and experience alongside organizational needs. This helps us match you with the team where you'll have the most impact.

Key responsibilities

Independently scope and lead complex, multi-month infrastructure projects, from an ambiguous starting point through to a production system

Make architectural decisions that shape the foundation other engineers and teams build on

Drive alignment on technical direction across teams, working through ambiguous problem spaces

Partner with research and product teams to understand their infrastructure and compute needs, and turn them into technical designs

Own the reliability, scalability, and security of the systems you build as usage and complexity grow

Set technical strategy and standards for your team's infrastructure

Build and improve operational processes such as incident response, postmortems, and on-call rotations, so the team learns from every incident

Mentor other engineers and help raise the technical bar for the team

Minimum qualifications

Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or infrastructure in production

A history of independently scoping and delivering complex, ambiguous, multi-month technical projects

Experience making architectural decisions that other engineers and teams build on

Strong software engineering fundamentals and proficiency in at least one programming language (for example, Python, Rust, Go, or Java)

Experience with modern cloud infrastructure, including Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code, on AWS and/or GCP

Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience driving alignment across teams or stakeholders

Preferred qualifications

10+ years of software engineering experience, not including internships

Experience with machine learning infrastructure such as GPUs, TPUs, or Trainium, and associated networking like NCCL

Low-level systems experience, such as Linux kernel tuning or eBPF

Background in security or privacy engineering best practices

Prior experience as a technical lead or mentor for other engineers

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.

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