Staff Software Engineer: Compute

Anthropic · San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA · Engineering

Posted 2026-09-10

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About the role

At Anthropic, we're building AI systems that are safe, beneficial, and transformative. Our mission is to develop AI that benefits humanity, and we believe the most powerful capabilities emerge when we thoughtfully bridge the gap between research breakthroughs and real-world applications.

Frontier AI runs on datacenters, and the world is in the middle of the largest infrastructure buildout in a generation. The binding constraint on progress is increasingly everything around the chips: land, power, permits, equipment, and the design and construction of the buildings themselves. Bringing a single site online involves hundreds of people, thousands of components, and decisions that move enormous amounts of capital. Much of that work still runs on spreadsheets and handoffs.

At Anthropic, we're building software and Claude-powered tools to help Anthropic scale out its compute, and we think there's an enormous opportunity to rethink how that work gets done. It's early, it's already having a real impact, and the engineers who join now will shape how one of the most consequential buildouts in the world gets done.

We're looking for strong, versatile software engineers who love building for people doing real work in the physical world. You'll embed with the teams that source sites, design buildings, procure equipment, and manage construction, learn their work deeply, and build the tools and systems they rely on every day. Datacenter experience is a big plus, but what matters most is that you can earn the trust of expert operators, model a messy domain cleanly, and move fast.

Responsibilities

Build the core systems that track a datacenter's lifecycle (sites, designs, bills of materials, equipment, and construction progress) in one trusted, permissioned source of truth

Embed with datacenter, energy, and supply chain teams to understand how the work actually gets done, find the critical path, and build the tools they reach for first

Bring order to messy data by migrating and reconciling spreadsheets and legacy trackers, and integrate with the industry's tools, like construction management, scheduling, and engineering systems

Design for trust: fine-grained permissions, auditability, and data quality for information that steers major investment decisions

Ship early, iterate with users, and cut anything that doesn't help bring compute online sooner

Partner with research to understand new model capabilities and share where they fall short in engineering-heavy, physical-world domains

You may be a good fit if you

Have 8+ years of experience building software, with strong full-stack skills and solid grounding in data modeling, APIs, and databases

Have built software that teams in a physical-world industry depend on, such as datacenters, construction, energy, manufacturing, supply chain, or logistics

Have a track record of zero-to-one work in startup or startup-like environments

Are deeply user-centric: you learn the domain from the people doing the work and validate with them before over-investing

Bring high agency and good judgment about what matters, and hold strong opinions loosely

Communicate clearly across engineering, operations, and research, and care about the societal impacts of your work

Strong candidates may also have

Experience in datacenters (at a hyperscaler, colocation provider, operator, utility, or engineering firm), or in adjacent fields like construction, logistics, or legal

Experience with the domain's tooling, such as construction management (Procore, Autodesk Construction Cloud), scheduling (Primavera P6), PLM/BOM, ERP and procurement, CAD/BIM, DCIM, or power system studies

A background in electrical, mechanical, or civil engineering, energy systems, or supply chain alongside a software career

Experience building products with large language models

Candidates need not have

100% of the skills listed above

Formal certifications or education credentials

Direct machine learning or AI research experience

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$405,000—$485,000 USD

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