Software Engineer, Kubernetes Platform

Position: Staff Software Engineer, Kubernetes Platform
About Anthropic Anthropic’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

We run one of the industry's largest AI compute fleets, spanning multiple cloud providers and datacenters, to train, research, and serve frontier AI models. Those fleets run on Kubernetes, and the Kubernetes Platform team owns the control plane that makes them work.

We are operating at a scale where the defaults stop working. We own the scheduler and extend it to place topology-sensitive ML workloads across thousands of accelerators  scale the control plane itself — apiserver, etcd, controllers — so it stays responsive as object counts and node counts grow by orders of magnitude. And we build the core cluster services every workload depends on, like service discovery, so they hold up under the same pressure.

We make sure the control plane is fast, correct, and always available. Your work will directly determine whether Anthropic can keep reliably and safely training frontier models as our compute footprint continues to grow.

Key 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 CRDsPartner with research, training, and inference 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

Minimum qualifications

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 causesA 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

Preferred 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, Zoo Keeper, Consul, or large DNS/service-mesh deployments)
Familiarity with ML infrastructure: GPUs, TPUs, or Trainium; gang scheduling; topology-aware placement; collective networking such as NCCLExperience 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

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:325,000—485,000 GBPLogistics

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…