Principal Software Engineer, Infrastructure

About the role: Anthropic is seeking talented and experienced Infrastructure Engineers to join our team and support the development, scaling, and maintenance of our cutting‑edge AI systems. By joining our Infrastructure team, you will have the opportunity to work on groundbreaking AI technologies and contribute to the development of frontier models, supporting Anthropic's mission to create safe and reliable AI systems that benefit humanity.

We currently have openings on:

• Data Infrastructure: The Data Infrastructure team is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the data infrastructure that powers our AI research and products. You will collaborate with cross‑functional teams to understand data requirements, deliver efficient and reliable data solutions, and continuously improve our data infrastructure. Your role will involve building and optimizing data pipelines, implementing data governance best practices, monitoring and troubleshooting, and setting technical strategies for high‑scale, reliable data infrastructure and pipelines. You will work with technologies such as Spark, Airflow, dbt, and cloud services from GCP and AWS.
• Research Infrastructure: The research infra team addresses the problem of developing and scaling systems that enable researchers to iterate quickly and also scale key systems/components used by researchers during the development phase to work at production scale as our model footprint grows.
• Site Reliability Engineering: As an SRE at Anthropic, you will design and implement scalable solutions, collaborate with development teams to improve infrastructure reliability, and establish monitoring systems, SLOs, and SLIs. You will implement fault‑tolerant design patterns, build automation tools, and participate in an on‑call rotation. Utilizing IaC principles, you will collaborate with cross‑functional teams to ensure reliability and scalability in new features and services, and accelerate engineering reliability through excellent tooling.
• Systems: The systems team is responsible for supporting some of the largest, most sophisticated clusters in industry used to train, research, and ultimately serve AI models. Your work will be crucial in ensuring Anthropic is able to continue reliably and safely training frontier models. You will be responsible for building systems and running large Kubernetes clusters with GPU/TPU/Tranium workloads.
• Observability: The observability team is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the observability infrastructure that ensures the reliability, performance, and efficiency of our AI systems and services. You will collaborate with cross‑functional teams to understand their observability requirements and deliver solutions using technologies such as Prometheus, Splunk, Cloud Logging, Grafana, and Honeycomb. Your role will involve developing a config‑driven approach to manage dashboards and alerts, implementing structured logging and tracing, optimizing the observability stack, and building a reliable system that requires minimal maintenance.

Responsibilities:

• Lead build out of industry‑leading AI clusters (thousands to hundreds of thousands of machines), partnering closely with cloud service providers on cluster build out and required features.
• Consult with different stakeholders to deeply understand infrastructure, data and compute needs, identifying potential solutions to support frontier research and product development.
• Set technical strategy and oversee development of high scale, reliable infrastructure systems.
• Mentor top technical talent.
• Design processes (e.g. postmortem review, incident response, on‑call rotations) that help the team operate effectively and never fail the same way twice.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 12+ years of relevant industry experience, 3+ years leading large scale, complex projects or teams as an engineer or tech lead.
• Are obsessed with distributed systems at scale, infrastructure reliability, scalability, security, and continuous improvement.
• Strong proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Rust, Go, Java).
• Strong problem‑solving skills and ability to work independently.
• Have a passion for supporting internal partners like research to understand their needs.
• Have excellent communication skills to build consensus with stakeholders, both internally and externally.
• Possess deep knowledge of modern cloud infrastructure including Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, AWS, and GCP.

Strong candidates may also:

• Have security and privacy best practice expertise.
• Experience with machine learning infrastructure like GPUs, TPUs, or Trainium, as well as supporting networking infrastructure like NCCL.
• Low level systems experience, for example linux kernel tuning and eBPF.
• Technical expertise: Quickly understanding systems design tradeoffs, keeping track of rapidly evolving software systems.

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. The expected salary range for this position is: Annual Salary: £225,000—£390,000 GBP.

Logistics Location‑based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

US visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate; operations roles are especially difficult to support. But if we make you an offer, we will make every effort to get you into the United States, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Compensation and Benefits: Anthropic’s compensation package consists of three elements: salary, equity, and benefits. We are committed to pay fairness and aim for these three elements collectively to be highly competitive with market rates. Equity - For eligible roles, equity will be a major component of the total compensation. We aim to offer higher‑than‑average equity compensation for a company of our size, and communicate equity amounts at the time of offer issuance.

US Benefits - The following benefits are for our US‑based employees: Optional equity donation matching. Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and all your dependents. 401(k) plan with 4% matching. 22 weeks of paid parental leave. Unlimited PTO – most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more! Stipends for education, home office improvements, commuting, and wellness. Fertility benefits via Carrot. Daily lunches and snacks in our office. Relocation support for those moving to the Bay Area.

UK Benefits - The following benefits are for our UK‑based employees: Optional equity donation matching. Private health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents. Pension contribution (matching 4% of your salary). 21 weeks of paid parental leave. Unlimited PTO – most staff take between 4-6 weeks each year, sometimes more! Health cash plan. Life insurance and income protection. Daily lunches and snacks in our office.