Staff Software Engineer, Kubernetes Platform (AI)

Location: San Francisco, CA; New York City, NY; or Seattle, WA. Staff are expected to work from one of the offices at least 25% of the time.

Annual salary: $320,000–$485,000 USD

Company

Anthropic develops reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems intended to be safe and beneficial for users and society.

What you will do

• Own, operate, and extend the Kubernetes scheduler for accelerator fleets, including gang scheduling, topology awareness, preemption, and custom scheduling policies.
• Scale Kubernetes control-plane components including apiserver, etcd, and controller-manager beyond typical cluster limits.
• Design, build, and operate core cluster services such as service discovery.
• Build and maintain custom controllers, operators, and CRDs.
• Partner with research, training, inference, cloud providers, and internal stakeholders to turn workload requirements into platform capabilities.
• Participate in on-call rotations, lead incident response, and improve postmortems, runbooks, and SLOs.

Requirements

• Significant experience building and operating production distributed systems.
• Proficiency in at least one systems-oriented language such as Go, Python, Rust, or C++.
• Deep hands-on Kubernetes experience with the scheduler, controllers, apiserver, or large multi-tenant clusters.
• Ability to debug complex issues across API, node, and network layers.
• Experience designing reliable systems with clear correctness and failure semantics.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; a bachelor's degree or equivalent experience is required.

Nice to have

• Experience with Kubernetes internals, kube-scheduler, scheduling frameworks, apiserver, etcd, client-go, or controller-runtime.
• Experience with cluster schedulers or batch systems such as Kueue, Volcano, or Slurm.
• Experience scaling coordination systems, ML infrastructure, GCP or AWS, GKE or EKS, and infrastructure as code.
• Low-level systems experience with Linux kernel tuning, cgroups, or eBPF.
• 10+ years of relevant industry experience, including leadership of large, ambiguous infrastructure projects.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative work across research, engineering, policy, and business functions.
• Flexible working hours and an office environment for collaboration.
• Competitive compensation, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation, and parental leave.
• Visa sponsorship is available, with immigration-lawyer support, subject to role and candidate eligibility.