Staff Infrastructure Engineer, Cluster Infrastructure

Anthropic•Seattle, WA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Anthropic's Infrastructure organization is foundational to our mission of developing AI systems that are reliable, interpretable, and steerable. The systems we build determine how quickly we can train new models, how reliably we can run safety experiments, and how effectively we can scale Claude to millions of users — demonstrating that safe, reliable infrastructure and frontier capabilities can go hand in hand. Cluster Infra owns the full lifecycle of compute clusters at Anthropic. We build agent-driven automation for cluster provisioning and lifecycle management across all major cloud providers and our own datacenters. Our systems stand up clusters that are interconnected with high bandwidth, secure-by-default, and able to automatically drain and recover in response to failure. As a Staff engineer on this team, you'll set the technical direction for how Anthropic brings compute online - at a moment when the scale of that compute is growing faster than at almost any company in the world.

Requirements

Deep expertise in distributed systems, reliability, and cloud platforms (e.g., Kubernetes, IaC, AWS/GCP/Azure)
Strong proficiency in at least one systems language (e.g., Rust, Go, or Python), IaC proficiency with Terraform.
Track record of leading complex, multi-quarter technical initiatives spanning multiple teams or systems
Ability to build alignment across senior stakeholders and communicate effectively at all levels

Nice To Haves

8+ years of software engineering experience, including time as a technical lead setting direction for a team
Experience operating large-scale compute infrastructure at hyperscale (100+ clusters, 10K+ nodes)
Depth in one or more of: Kubernetes internals, cluster provisioning and management systems, cluster orchestration systems (Mesos, Borg-like)
Experience with cloud networking: VPC design and peering, Shared VPC/Transit Gateway, Cloud Interconnect/Direct Connect, Cloud NAT, cross-cloud private connectivity, BGP and route control, edge load balancing and DDoS mitigation (Cloud Armor / AWS Shield)
Experience with cluster and host networking: CNI (Cilium), eBPF, NetworkPolicy, multi-NIC, sFlow, service mesh (Istio/Envoy/Linkerd, mTLS)
Experience with cluster security: pod security standards and admission control, RBAC and least-privilege IAM, node and container hardening, supply-chain/image provenance
Deep experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Atlantis), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Argo Workflows)
Skill in quickly understanding systems design tradeoffs and keeping track of rapidly evolving software systems

Responsibilities

Own the technical strategy and roadmap for agent-driven cluster lifecycle management - provisioning, updates and decommissioning
Partner across teams to ensure new compute capacity is ingested on time
Align with partner teams on physical build-out and leverage cloud solutions to deliver high-bandwidth inter-cluster connectivity
Collaborate with security owners to ensure clusters are provisioned secure-by-default
Define and drive strategy on cluster scalability, homogeneity and fault tolerance
Work closely with cloud providers and internal research, inference and product teams to shape long-term compute, data, and infrastructure strategy
Establish and evolve operational-excellence practices: incident response, postmortem culture and on-call health
Support the growth of engineers around you through technical mentorship and coaching