Staff Software Engineer, Kubernetes Platform (AI)

Location: Hybrid; must be based in San Francisco, New York City, or Seattle (minimum 25% office presence required)

Salary: $320,000 - $405,000 USD

Company

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation dedicated to creating reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems that are safe and beneficial for society.

What you will do

• Own and extend the Kubernetes scheduler for accelerator fleets, implementing custom plugins for gang scheduling and topology awareness.
• Scale the Kubernetes control plane (apiserver, etcd, controller-manager) to support clusters far beyond typical industry limits.
• Design 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 to enhance platform capabilities.
• Partner with research, training, and inference teams to translate ML workload requirements into platform features.
• Lead incident response, manage on-call rotations, and design reliability processes including SLOs and postmortems.

Requirements

• Significant software engineering experience building and operating production distributed systems.
• Proficiency in at least one systems-appropriate language (Go, Python, Rust, or C++).
• Deep hands-on Kubernetes expertise, specifically regarding the scheduler, controllers, and apiserver.
• Ability to debug complex issues across the stack, from API behavior to node and network-level root causes.
• Must be based in the USA (SF, NYC, or Seattle) to comply with the hybrid office policy.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education and experience.

Nice to have

• Contributions to Kubernetes internals (kube-scheduler, etcd, client-go, etc.).
• Experience with batch systems such as Slurm, Volcano, or Kueue.
• Familiarity with ML infrastructure, including GPUs, TPUs, and collective networking (NCCL).
• Low-level systems experience with Linux kernel tuning, cgroups, or eBPF.
• 8+ years of industry experience leading large, ambiguous infrastructure projects.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative "big science" research environment focused on high-impact AI safety goals.
• Competitive compensation with optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave policies.
• Flexible working hours and modern collaborative office spaces.
• Visa sponsorship support available for qualifying candidates.