Hardware Lab Manager

Anthropic•San Francisco, NY

22h•Onsite

About The Position

Anthropic's mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The Foragers team is a new Field Services team within our physical infrastructure organization, responsible for hardware deployment and site readiness. This role is the lab-focused counterpart to traveling field engineers, owning Anthropic's Bay Area hardware labs end-to-end. The mission is to ensure hardware labs are functional, useful, and ready to support growing teams and projects. This includes managing received hardware, power, cooling, cabling, tracking, setup, and functionality, covering both standard and specialized hardware. Understanding and anticipating the needs of teams relying on the labs, taking ownership, and collaborating with partner teams to ensure future needs are met are critical. This role will shape the lab's scaling from its current state to much larger facilities.

Requirements

Hands-on experience running a hardware, systems, or datacenter lab, or a similar physical compute environment: rack-and-stack, copper and fiber cabling, power distribution (PDUs, circuits, phase balancing)
Working knowledge of server hardware and its management plane: BMC/IPMI/Redfish, BIOS/UEFI configuration, serial console, PXE/network boot, firmware updates
Enough Linux and networking (VLANs, DHCP, DNS, basic switch config) to take a bare machine to a state a remote engineer can use
Managed vendors, contractors, quotes, and freight for physical equipment
Comfortable and safe with power tools, bench power supplies, and a wiring or rack elevation diagram
Work independently with minimal supervision, and know when to ask
Bias toward action and comfort with ambiguity: you'd rather move and adjust than wait for perfect information
Communicate clearly and directly, especially when flagging risks or blockers

Nice To Haves

Stood up a lab or datacenter room from empty: layout, power and cooling budget, first round of purchasing
Time around high-density accelerator systems (GPU/TPU-class racks), liquid cooling, or pre-release/NPI hardware bring-up
Electronics bench skills: soldering and rework, scope and multimeter, custom cable and debug harnesses, JTAG probes, light fabrication (3D printing, drilling, mounting)
Supported hardware security, firmware, or platform bring-up work
Experience with DCIM or asset-management tooling (NetBox, ServiceNow, etc.)
Bought hard-to-source or specialty hardware and dealt with the compliance and logistics that come with it

Responsibilities

Run the physical lab across both sites: receiving and staging, rack-and-stack, cabling, power distribution and load planning, cooling, floor layout
Bring up new server and accelerator platforms as they arrive, from crate to a machine someone can SSH into: firmware and BIOS/UEFI setup, out-of-band management, OS install, network provisioning
Own hardware procurement for the lab: work with teams on what's coming, order ahead of need, chase quotes and lead times, keep receiving and inventory in order
Own RMA processes end-to-end for lab hardware: triage, swap, ship, track, close; drive vendor escalations
Build the one-off setups engineers ask for: debug and programming harnesses (JTAG/SWD/UART), remote power switching, console and KVM access, and the occasional improvised fix for hardware running outside the conditions it was designed for
Oversee smarthands and contractor work on-site (electricians, cabling crews, riggers, integrators, OEM field engineers): scope it, dispatch it, validate the quality
Handle physical access, asset auditing, and lifecycle tracking for hardware that is expensive and sometimes pre-release
Write it down: build the playbooks and lightweight tooling (inventory, remote power, console access) so remote teams can use the lab without pinging you for every step