Staff Infrastructure Engineer (Cluster Infrastructure)

Join Anthropic, a leading AI safety and research company. As a Staff Infrastructure Engineer, you will be responsible for the technical strategy and roadmap for agent-driven cluster lifecycle management. You will collaborate with various teams to ensure timely ingestion of new compute capacity, align with partner teams on physical build-out, and define strategies for cluster scalability and fault tolerance. You will also establish operational-excellence practices and support the growth of engineers through mentorship and coaching.

• Own the technical strategy and roadmap for agent-driven cluster lifecycle management, including provisioning, updates, and decommissioning.
• Collaborate with security owners to ensure clusters are provisioned secure-by-default and define and drive strategy on cluster scalability, homogeneity, and fault tolerance.
• Establish and evolve operational-excellence practices, including incident response, postmortem culture, and on-call health, while supporting the growth of engineers through technical mentorship and coaching.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including time as a technical lead setting direction for a team
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, reliability, and cloud platforms (e.g., Kubernetes, IaC, AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Ability to build alignment across senior stakeholders and communicate effectively at all levels
• 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
• Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
• Experience with cluster security: pod security standards and admission control, RBAC and least-privilege IAM, node and container hardening, supply-chain/image provenance
• Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
• Deep experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Atlantis), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Argo Workflows)
• Experience with cluster and host networking: CNI (Cilium), eBPF, NetworkPolicy, multi-NIC, sFlow, service mesh (Istio/Envoy/Linkerd, mTLS)
• 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)
• Skill in quickly understanding systems design tradeoffs and keeping track of rapidly evolving software systems
• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Depth in one or more of: Kubernetes internals, cluster provisioning and management systems, cluster orchestration systems (Mesos, Borg-like)
• Experience operating large-scale compute infrastructure at hyperscale (100+ clusters, 10K+ nodes)
• We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed