Staff Software Engineer, Kubernetes Platform

About Anthropic

Anthropics 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

Anthropic runs some of the largest Kubernetes clusters in the industry. We have fleets of hundreds of thousands of nodes across multiple cloud providers and datacenters to train research and serve frontier AI models. The Kubernetes Platform team owns the Kubernetes control plane that makes those clusters 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 Anthropics 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
• 8 years of relevant industry experience including time leading large ambiguous infrastructure projects

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelors 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 arent 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 youre interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones were 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 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 youre ever unsure about a communication dont click any linksvisit for confirmed position openings.

How were 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. Were 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 aboutour policyfor using AI in our application process