Staff+ Software Engineer, Kubernetes Platform
Anthropic · San Francisco, United States +2 · 4mo ago
About Anthropic
Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.
About the role
We run one of the industry's largest AI compute fleets, spanning multiple cloud providers and datacenters, to train, research, and serve frontier AI models. Those fleets run on Kubernetes, and the Kubernetes Platform team owns the control plane that makes them work.
We are operating at a scale where the defaults stop working. We own the scheduler and extend it to place topology-sensitive ML workloads across thousands of accelerators at once. We scale the control plane itself — apiserver, etcd, controllers — so it stays responsive as object counts and node counts grow by orders of magnitude. And we build the core cluster services every workload depends on, like service discovery, so they hold up under the same pressure.
We make sure the control plane is fast, correct, and always available. Your work will directly determine whether Anthropic can keep reliably and safely training frontier models as our compute footprint continues to grow.
Key responsibilities
- Own, operate, and extend the Kubernetes scheduler for Anthropic's accelerator fleets, including custom scheduling plugins and policies for gang scheduling, topology awareness, and preemption
- Scale the Kubernetes control plane (apiserver, etcd, controller-manager) to support clusters far beyond typical limits, and find the next bottleneck before it finds us
- Design, build, and operate core cluster services such as service discovery that every workload in the fleet depends on
- Build and maintain custom controllers, operators, and CRDs
- Partner with research, training, and inference to understand workload shapes and turn their requirements into platform capabilities
- Collaborate with cloud providers on required features and escalations
- Participate in on-call, lead incident response, and design processes (postmortems, runbooks, SLOs) that help the team avoid repeating failures
Minimum qualifications
- Significant software engineering experience building and operating production distributed systems
- Proficiency in at least one systems-appropriate language (e.g., Go, Python, Rust, or C++)
- Deep, hands-on Kubernetes experience (well beyond "user of”) into scheduler, controllers, apiserver, or operating large multi-tenant clusters
- Demonstrated ability to debug complex issues across the stack, from API behavior down to node and network-level root causes
- A track record of designing for reliability, correctness, and clear failure semantics in systems other engineers depend on
- Strong written and verbal communication; comfort building consensus with internal stakeholders
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with Kubernetes internals or contributions: kube-scheduler / scheduling framework, apiserver, etcd, client-go, controller-runtime, or similar
- Experience building or operating cluster schedulers or batch systems (e.g., Kueue, Volcano, Slurm, or in-house equivalents)
- Background scaling control planes or coordination systems (etcd, ZooKeeper, Consul, or large DNS/service-mesh deployments)
- Familiarity with ML infrastructure: GPUs, TPUs, or Trainium; gang scheduling; topology-aware placement; collective networking such as NCCL
- Experience with GCP and/or AWS, including GKE/EKS internals and Infrastructure as Code
- Low-level systems experience such as Linux kernel tuning, cgroups, or eBPF
- 10+ years of relevant industry experience, including time leading large, ambiguous infrastructure projects
The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.
For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.
Logistics
Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.
Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.
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. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.
Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.
How we're different
We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.
The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.
Come work with us!
Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.