Greenhouse ·
contractPrincipal Engineer Capacity/compute
Anthropic · San Francisco, CA
Anthropic is an AI research and safety company focused on developing reliable, interpretable, and steerable artificial intelligence systems. As a Principal Engineer in Capacity and Compute, you will play a critical role in managing and optimizing one of the industry's largest and most complex infrastructure fleets. This contract role involves building production-grade systems to track, measure, and maximize the utilization of diverse compute resources across multiple cloud providers and hardware architectures. Your daily responsibilities will span data engineering, systems observability, and infrastructure planning. You will develop pipelines for telemetry ingestion, create tools for real-time fleet visibility, and establish performance instrumentation to ensure hardware efficiency. This position requires deep expertise in Kubernetes-native environments and the ability to bridge the gap between technical infrastructure, research engineering, and financial planning. The ideal candidate is a highly autonomous systems engineer who excels in ambiguous environments, possesses strong data modeling skills, and can communicate complex capacity metrics to both technical teams and leadership. You will directly influence large-scale compute strategy, requiring a balance of rigorous software engineering and strategic operational planning.
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 Anthropic manages one of the largest and fastest-growing infrastructure fleets in the industry — spanning multiple accelerator families, cpu families and clouds. The Capacity Engineering team is responsible for making sure all our infrastructure resources are accounted for, well-utilized, and efficiently allocated. We own the data, tooling, and operational systems that let Anthropic plan, measure, and maximize utilization across first-party and third-party compute. As an engineer on Capacity Engineering, you will build the production systems that power this work: data pipelines that ingest and normalize telemetry from heterogeneous cloud environments, observability tooling that gives the org real-time visibility into fleet health, and performance instrumentation that measures how efficiently every major workload uses the hardware it’s running on. You will be expected to write production-quality code every day, operate alongside Kubernetes-native infrastructure at meaningful scale, and directly influence decisions around one of Anthropic’s largest areas of spend. You’ll collaborate closely with research engineering, infrastructure, inference, and finance teams. The work requires someone who can move between data engineering, systems engineering, and observability with comfort — and who thrives in a high-autonomy, high-ambiguity environment. This is a pipeline role feeding four areas. Depending on your background and business priority, you’ll focus primarily in one, but the boundaries are fluid and the problems overlap: Data platform Pipelines that ingest occupancy and utilization telemetry from Kubernetes clusters, normalize billing and usage across cloud providers, and serve the BigQuery tables the rest of the org queries against. Correctness, completeness, and latency are the job, not a footnote. Consumers range from research engineers to finance to leadership, so it's product work as much as engineering: defining schema contracts, making data discoverable, and figuring out what people actually need. Planning Knowing what the fleet has, where it's going, and what's in the way. Making the state of the fleet legible and actionable in real time: cluster health tooling, capacity planning platforms, alerting on occupancy drops and allocation problems, and systemic fixes to scheduling and fragmentation. Kubernetes operations on one side, cross-team coordination on the other. Efficiency Measuring and improving how effectively every major workload uses the hardware it runs on. Instrumenting utilization across training, inference, and eval systems, building benchmarking infrastructure, establishing per-config baselines, and working directly with system-owning teams to close the gaps. The metric has to be good enough that the team on the hook for it agrees with the number. Attribution and forecasting Connecting what the fleet costs to what the business is doing with it. Reconciling CSP billing exports against vendor telemetry and internal systems with mismatched schemas, attributing spend to the workloads and teams that generate it, and turning inference demand signals and research roadmaps into a defensible compute plan. Efficiency metrics have to survive contact with finance: stripped of pure demand and unit-price effects, reproducible month over month, and legible to a CFO. Key responsibilities Build the planning and allocation stack — the tools leadership uses to allocate capacity, teams use to plan against their allocations, and the scheduler enforces. Cross-region and cross-provider placement, guardrails, queueing, occupancy KPIs. Drive the efficiency programs: stranding and rightsizing, unused capacity recovery, and job-level utilization across training, inference, and eval. Establish per-config baselines and work with system-owning teams to close the gaps. Utilization improvements are worth enormous sums at our scale. Own attribution and forecasting — reconcile billing across ten-plus providers against telemetry and internal systems, attribute spend to the workloads that generate it, and turn demand signals and research roadmaps into a defensible compute plan and supply pipeline. Build the data platform underneath all of it: pipelines ingesting occupancy, utilization, and cost from a rapidly diversifying fleet into BigQuery, with real ownership of completeness, latency SLOs, and gap detection. Every new provider is a net-new integration. Operate Kubernetes-native systems at scale — collection agents, workload labeling, and the taint/reservation/scheduling behavior that determines what capacity is actually usable. Treat the output as a product, not a pipeline. Ga
| Role | Principal Engineer Capacity/compute |
|---|---|
| Company | Anthropic |
| Location | San Francisco, CA |
| Type | contract |
| Compensation | Not disclosed |
| Posted | 2026-10-18 |
| Deadline | Rolling |
Typical process for this type of role
A general guide — the exact steps for this specific listing may vary; check the original posting for details.
- 1ApplicationSubmit your resume through the apply link.
- 2ScreeningRecruiter reviews your background against the role.
- 3AssessmentA technical test, assignment, or coding round, depending on the role.
- 4Interview(s)One or more rounds with the hiring team.
- 5OfferOffer letter with compensation and start date.
Before you apply
0/4Principal Engineer Capacity/compute at Anthropic: frequently asked questions
- What is the salary for this role?
- Anthropic has not stated compensation in the listing. Check the original posting or ask during the application process.
- Is the Principal Engineer Capacity/compute position remote, hybrid or onsite?
- The listing gives San Francisco, CA as the location and does not state a work mode.
- What is the application deadline?
- Anthropic has not listed a fixed deadline, so apply early in case the opening is filled.
- How do I apply for the Principal Engineer Capacity/compute role?
- Use the Apply button on this page. It opens the original listing on job-boards.greenhouse.io, where you submit your application with the company.
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