Hardware Lab Manager

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.

Foragers is a new Field Services team within our physical infrastructure organization. Were the boots on the ground for Anthropics 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.

Your mission is to ensure our hardware labs are functional useful and ready to support the growing number of teams and projects that need access to physical hardware. Youd own what shows up how its powered cooled cabled tracked set up and made functional. This includes both standard hardware (think typical accelerator setups) and more specialized ones like ensuring our security teams have access to all the right headers and other hardware instrumentation on the machines.

Understanding and anticipating the needs of the various teams that rely on the labs will be another critical part of this role. Youll be expected to take a lot of ownership and initiative over the lab and whats in it including reaching out to partner teams to figure out what theyd need in the future and making sure its there before it starts to block them. This will require you to collaborate closely with those partner teams so a breadth of knowledge around hardware is extremely useful.

Youd be the first dedicated lab manager so part of this role will include shaping it to scale from our current lab to much larger ones.

• 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 whats 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

• 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: youd rather move and adjust than wait for perfect information
• Communicate clearly and directly especially when flagging risks or blockers

• 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

This role is based in our San Francisco office (500 Howard St). Travel to nearby lab spaces is required so expect to be in-office more frequently than Anthropics standard 25% hybrid baseline.

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.

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.

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 policy for using AI in our application process.