Staff Infrastructure Engineer, Cluster Infrastructure

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

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.

What it asks for · 4

• 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

Also a plus

• 10+ 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

What the job covers

• 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

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• cluster12×
• systems10×
• cloud8×
• compute6×
• experience6×
• technical5×
• infrastructure4×
• build3×
• security3×
• strategy3×
• agent-driven2×
• cloud providers2×
• cluster provisioning2×
• connectivity2×
• control2×
• deep2×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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