Hardware Lab Manager

Anthropic•San Francisco, CA

1d•$320,000 - $405,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Anthropic is seeking a Hardware Lab Manager to ensure their hardware labs are functional, useful, and ready to support the growing number of teams and projects that need access to physical hardware. This role involves owning everything from receiving hardware to powering, cooling, cabling, tracking, and setting up machines. The manager will also be responsible for understanding and anticipating the needs of various teams, collaborating closely with them, and shaping the lab's operations to scale. This is a unique opportunity to be the first dedicated lab manager and significantly influence the team's direction.

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
Have 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