Staff Infrastructure Engineer, Cluster Infrastructure in London

About the company: The company’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role: The company's Infrastructure organization is foundational to our mission of developing AI systems that are reliable, interpretable, and steerable. The systems we build determine how quickly we can train new models, how reliably we can run safety experiments, and how effectively we can scale Claude to millions of users — demonstrating that safe, reliable infrastructure and frontier capabilities can go hand in hand.

Cluster Infra owns the full lifecycle of compute clusters at the company. We build agent-driven automation for cluster provisioning and lifecycle management across all major cloud providers and our own datacenters. Our systems stand up clusters that are interconnected with high bandwidth, secure-by-default, and able to automatically drain and recover in response to failure. As a Staff engineer on this team, you'll set the technical direction for how the company brings compute online - at a moment when the scale of that compute is growing faster than at almost any company in the world.

Key responsibilities:

• Own the technical strategy and roadmap for agent-driven cluster lifecycle management - provisioning, updates and decommissioning.
• Partner across teams to ensure new compute capacity is ingested on time.
• Align with partner teams on physical build‑out and leverage cloud solutions to deliver high‑bandwidth inter‑cluster connectivity.
• Collaborate with security owners to ensure clusters are provisioned secure‑by‑default.
• Define and drive strategy on cluster scalability, homogeneity and fault tolerance.
• Work closely with cloud providers and internal research, inference and product teams to shape long‑term compute, data, and infrastructure strategy.
• Establish and evolve operational‑excellence practices: incident response, postmortem culture and on‑call health.
• Support the growth of engineers around you through technical mentorship and coaching.

Minimum qualifications:

• Deep expertise in distributed systems, reliability, and cloud platforms (e.g., Kubernetes, IaC, AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Strong proficiency in at least one systems language (e.g., Rust, Go, or Python), IaC proficiency with Terraform.
• Track record of leading complex, multi-quarter technical initiatives spanning multiple teams or systems.
• Ability to build alignment across senior stakeholders and communicate effectively at all levels.

Preferred qualifications:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including time as a technical lead setting direction for a team.
• Experience operating large-scale compute infrastructure at hyperscale (100+ clusters, 10K+ nodes).
• Depth in one or more of: Kubernetes internals, cluster provisioning and management systems, cluster orchestration systems (Mesos, Borg-like).
• Experience with cloud networking: VPC design and peering, Shared VPC/Transit Gateway, Cloud Interconnect/Direct Connect, Cloud NAT, cross‑cloud private connectivity, BGP and route control, edge load balancing and DDoS mitigation (Cloud Armor / AWS Shield).
• Experience with cluster and host networking: CNI (Cilium), eBPF, NetworkPolicy, multi‑NIC, sFlow, service mesh (Istio/Envoy/Linkerd, mTLS).
• Experience with cluster security: pod security standards and admission control, RBAC and least‑privilege IAM, node and container hardening, supply‑chain/image provenance.
• Deep experience with infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform, Atlantis), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Argo Workflows).
• Skill in quickly understanding systems design tradeoffs and keeping track of rapidly evolving software systems.

Annual Salary: £325,000 — £485,000 GBP

Logistics:

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.
• Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.
• Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position.
• 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.
• Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.