Hardware Lab Manager

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

Foragers is a new Field Services team within our physical infrastructure organization. We're the boots on the ground for Anthropic's physical infrastructure: the people who get hardware into racks, gear commissioned, and sites handed over. The team is being stood up now, so early hires shape how we operate. This role is the lab-focused counterpart to our traveling field engineers. Instead of covering sites across the country, you own our Bay Area hardware labs from end to end.

What it asks for · 8

• 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

Also a plus

• 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

What the job covers

• 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

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• hardware16×
• lab13×
• physical7×
• power7×
• access5×
• engineers4×
• remote4×
• accelerator3×
• console3×
• cooling3×
• firmware3×
• machine3×
• racks3×
• setups3×
• sites3×
• around2×

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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