Hardware Systems Architect (AI)

Location: San Francisco, CA; New York City, NY; or Seattle, WA. Hybrid policy: staff are expected to work from one of the offices at least 25% of the time; some roles may require more office time.

Annual salary: $320,000–$485,000 USD.

Company

Anthropic develops reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems as a public benefit corporation.

What you will do

• Own system path-finding and architecture for large-scale compute, networking, storage, and accelerator systems from concept and requirements through specification, design review, deployment, and production.
• Write high-level system, board, interface, and rack requirements and specifications for internal teams and external partners.
• Review vendor and partner designs, make build, buy, and co-design decisions, and identify technical misalignment and schedule risks.
• Drive interconnect and networking architecture across scale-up and scale-out fabrics, NICs, switches, optics, and topology.
• Architect boards, chassis, racks, and data-hall interfaces, including PCB design, component placement, connectors, cabling, power, and thermal budgets.
• Develop performance simulations and hardware models; define bring-up, validation, qualification, telemetry, reliability, and serviceability strategies in collaboration with ML performance, infrastructure software, supply chain, datacenter, vendors, and partners.

Requirements

• Deep, hands-on expertise in at least one core hardware-systems domain, such as interconnect, power, or thermal, for large-scale compute or networking systems.
• Experience owning hardware system architecture at machine, rack, row, and cluster scale and authoring specifications and requirements.
• Experience taking hardware from architecture through bring-up and high-volume production deployment.
• Experience working with external hardware vendors and partners, reviewing their designs, and holding them to specifications.
• Ability to reason about trade-offs across interconnect, power, thermal, and mechanical domains.
• Track record of technical leadership, including owning directional decisions and driving alignment across teams and partners.
• Ability to operate with high autonomy and limited process in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment.
• Strong written communication for specifications and design reviews used by multiple teams.
• Minimum education: bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience in a field relevant to the role, demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.

Nice to have

• 8+ years of hardware systems architecture or engineering experience in hyperscale, HPC, AI/ML, or high-end networking platforms.
• Experience with AI accelerator systems, including GPU, TPU, or custom ASIC platforms and scale-up or scale-out fabrics.
• Familiarity with chip-package-system interfaces and co-design.
• Experience establishing a new function, program, or engineering practice.
• Curiosity about using AI tools in engineering workflows.
• Depth in high-speed SerDes, PCIe/CXL, Ethernet/InfiniBand, optical interconnect, BMC and platform firmware, hardware root of trust, secure boot, 48V/HVDC power delivery, direct liquid cooling, fleet-scale reliability, RAS architecture, signal integrity, or power integrity.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative work across research, engineering, policy, business, ML performance, infrastructure software, supply chain, datacenter, and hardware partner teams.
• Opportunity to develop AI-assisted approaches to hardware design, specification review, validation, and consistency checking.
• Flexible working hours, generous vacation and parental leave, competitive benefits, and optional equity donation matching.
• Office-based collaboration with frequent research discussions and an emphasis on communication and high-impact work.
• Anthropic sponsors visas and makes reasonable efforts to support visa applications with an immigration lawyer, subject to role and candidate eligibility.

Hiring process

• Candidate AI usage is governed by Anthropic’s policy for the application process.