Senior Staff+ Software Engineer, Kubernetes Platform

About the role

The Kubernetes Platform team at Anthropic owns, operates, and extends the Kubernetes scheduler for Anthropic's accelerator fleets. They also scale the Kubernetes control plane and build core cluster services like service discovery. Their work directly impacts the reliability and safety of Anthropic's training of frontier AI models.

Responsibilities

• Own, operate, and extend the Kubernetes scheduler for Anthropic's accelerator fleets, including custom scheduling plugins and policies for gang scheduling, topology awareness, and preemption.
• Scale the Kubernetes control plane (apiserver, etcd, controller-manager) to support clusters far beyond typical limits, and find the next bottleneck before it finds us.
• Design, build, and operate core cluster services such as service discovery that every workload in the fleet depends on.
• Build and maintain custom controllers, operators, and CRDs.
• Partner with research, training, and inference teams to understand workload shapes and turn their requirements into platform capabilities.
• Collaborate with cloud providers on required features and escalations.
• Participate in on-call, lead incident response, and design processes (postmortems, runbooks, SLOs) that help the team avoid repeating failures.

Requirements

• Significant software engineering experience building and operating production distributed systems.
• Proficiency in at least one systems-appropriate language (e.g., Go, Python, Rust, or C++).
• Deep, hands-on Kubernetes experience (well beyond "user of") into scheduler, controllers, apiserver, or operating large multi-tenant clusters.
• Demonstrated ability to debug complex issues across the stack, from API behavior down to node and network-level root causes.
• A track record of designing for reliability, correctness, and clear failure semantics in systems other engineers depend on.
• Strong written and verbal communication; comfort building consensus with internal stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Experience with Kubernetes internals or contributions: kube-scheduler / scheduling framework, apiserver, etcd, client-go, controller-runtime, or similar.
• Experience building or operating cluster schedulers or batch systems (e.g., Kueue, Volcano, Slurm, or in-house equivalents).
• Background scaling control planes or coordination systems (etcd, ZooKeeper, Consul, or large DNS/service-mesh deployments).
• Familiarity with ML infrastructure: GPUs, TPUs, or Trainium; gang scheduling; topology-aware placement; collective networking such as NCCL.
• Experience with GCP and/or AWS, including GKE/EKS internals and Infrastructure as Code.
• Low-level systems experience such as Linux kernel tuning, cgroups, or eBPF.
• 12+ years of relevant industry experience, including time leading large, ambiguous infrastructure projects.

Pay

The annual compensation range for this role is $405,000—$485,000 USD.

Schedule

Anthropic offers a 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.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits.
• Optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Flexible working hours.
• A lovely office space for collaboration.

Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage

We believe that the easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.