Staff Engineer, Datacenter Server Lifecycle

Location: San Francisco, CA; New York City, NY; or Seattle, WA. Hybrid policy requires staff to be in one of the offices at least 25% of the time, with occasional travel to datacenter sites across North America.

Annual salary: $320,000–$405,000 USD

Company

Anthropic builds reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems designed to be safe and beneficial.

What you will do

• Build automation and operational tooling for datacenter server fleets at scale.
• Own the server lifecycle strategy from provisioning and deployment through operation, maintenance, refresh, and decommissioning.
• Define and maintain procedures for hardware failures, firmware upgrades, and fleet rotations.
• Partner with Infrastructure Security to establish trusted compute standards, secure provisioning, attestation, and hardware integrity controls.
• Collaborate with Networking to ensure connectivity across datacenter sites.
• Track machine health, configuration, and operational status across the fleet.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience with server hardware, including rack deployment, cabling, troubleshooting, and large-scale failure modes.
• End-to-end knowledge of hardware lifecycle management, asset tracking, provisioning, maintenance scheduling, and decommissioning.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language such as Python, Rust, Go, or Java.
• Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and large-scale cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent education, training, or experience in a relevant field.
• Strong communication skills, stakeholder alignment, and the ability to navigate complex cross-functional problems.

Nice to have

• 8+ years of experience in datacenter infrastructure management or a related discipline.
• Experience with GPU or AI accelerator hardware, including NVIDIA A100/H100, Google TPUs, or AWS Trainium.
• Familiarity with LinuxBoot, NixOS, server operating system distributions, and fleet management platforms.
• Experience with capacity planning, hardware refresh strategy, and hyperscale cloud environments.
• Knowledge of secure boot, TPM, hardware attestation, firmware verification, and trusted compute.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative environment focused on large-scale AI research and trustworthy AI systems.
• Flexible working hours and office collaboration.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Competitive compensation, benefits, and optional equity donation matching.
• Visa sponsorship is available, with immigration lawyer support, although sponsorship eligibility depends on the role and candidate.