Data Center Operations Lead (Partner Site Operations)

Location: Austin, TX; San Francisco, CA; or New York City, NY, United States. Remote-friendly, but staff are currently expected to work from one of the offices at least 25% of the time; travel and non-standard hours may be required.

Annual salary: $320,000–$405,000 USD.

Company

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

What you will do

• Own availability, deployment milestones, repair turnaround, and operational outcomes for assigned partner-operated data center sites.
• Provide tactical direction to vendor site teams, set priorities, and lead standups, operating cadences, and business reviews.
• Define and improve procedures for deployment, break-fix operations, change management, security, and EHS compliance.
• Track vendor performance against SLAs and staffing commitments, driving corrective actions and standardizing operational improvements.
• Serve in the incident escalation on-call rotation, direct vendor response as Incident Commander, manage communications, and close post-incident actions.
• Translate engineering requirements into vendor direction and establish operational readiness for new data halls, including spares and security.

Requirements

• 8+ years of data center operations experience across hardware, IT infrastructure, or critical facilities, with accountability for production availability.
• Experience managing vendors, MSPs, or contract workforces through SOWs, SLAs, operational reviews, and corrective actions.
• Hands-on technical depth in server, network, and rack-level infrastructure sufficient to independently verify vendor claims and audit quality.
• Experience building or substantially improving operational processes and serving in an incident command or lead-responder role.
• Availability for non-standard hours, on-call rotation, deployment surges, and maintenance windows.
• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with third-party colocation providers, partner-operated sites, or multi-vendor facilities.
• Experience standing up operations at a new site or data hall through commissioning and first deployment.
• Experience with GPU or accelerator systems, high-density liquid-cooled infrastructure, incident management frameworks, contract/SLA design, or EHS programs.
• Experience leading cross-functional projects from initiation to completion without direct ownership of all participating teams.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative environment focused on high-impact AI research and trustworthy AI systems.
• Competitive compensation with optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Flexible working hours and office-based collaboration.
• Visa sponsorship is available where feasible, supported by an immigration lawyer.