Data Infrastructure Engineer, Pre-training San Francisco, CA

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.

Anthropic is at the forefront of AI research, dedicated to developing safe, ethical, and powerful artificial intelligence. Our mission is to ensure that transformative AI systems are aligned with human interests. We are seeking a Staff level Engineer to join our Pre-training team, responsible for developing the next generation of large language models. In this role, you will work at the intersection of cutting-edge research and practical engineering, contributing to the development of safe, steerable, and trustworthy AI systems.

• Design and implement data processing infrastructure for large language model training (highly performant, reproducible, traceable)
• Develop and maintain core processing primitives (e.g., tokenization, deduplication, chunking) with a focus on scalability
• Build robust systems for data quality assurance and validation at scale
• Collaborate with research teams to implement novel data processing architectures
• Build and operate end-to-end data pipelines that turn raw web-scale corpora into training-ready datasets

• 5+ YOE outside of internships
• Strong software engineering skills with experience building high-throughput fault-tolerant distributed systems
• Hands-on experience with distributed computing frameworks, particularly Apache Spark
• Excellent problem-solving skills and attention to detail
• Strong communication skills and ability to work in a collaborative environment
• Advanced degree in Computer Science or related field
• Experience with language model training infrastructure
• Background in Data Infrastructure, MLOps, or ML infrastructure

• Have significant experience building high-throughput fault-tolerant distributed systems
• Expertise with Python and Rust
• Passionate about system reliability and performance
• Are comfortable working with ambiguous requirements and evolving specifications
• Take ownership of problems and drive solutions independently
• Are excited about contributing to the development of safe and ethical AI systems
• Can balance technical excellence with practical delivery
• Are eager to learn about machine learning research and its infrastructure requirements

• Designing and implementing distributed computing architecture for web-scale data processing
• Building scalable infrastructure for model training data preparation
• Implementing new infrastructure components based on research requirements

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.

$500,000 - $850,000 USD

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.

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…