Staff+ Software Engineer, Kubernetes Platform

About the role

Anthropic operates one of the industry’s largest AI compute fleets on Kubernetes. The Staff+ Software Engineer will own and evolve the Kubernetes control plane, ensuring it scales reliably as the company trains frontier AI models.

Key responsibilities

• Own, operate, and extend the Kubernetes scheduler for accelerator fleets, including custom plugins for gang scheduling, topology awareness, and preemption.
• Scale the Kubernetes control plane components (apiserver, etcd, controller‑manager) far beyond typical limits and proactively address bottlenecks.
• Design, build, and operate core cluster services such as service discovery that support all workloads.
• Develop and maintain custom controllers, operators, and CRDs.
• Partner with research, training, and inference teams to translate workload requirements into platform capabilities.
• Collaborate with cloud providers on feature development and escalation handling.
• Participate in on‑call rotation, lead incident response, and create post‑mortems, runbooks, and SLOs.

Required profile

• 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 beyond basic usage, especially with the scheduler, controllers, apiserver, or large multi‑tenant clusters.
• Proven ability to debug complex issues across the stack, from API behavior to node and network level.
• Track record of designing for reliability, correctness, and clear failure semantics.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and ability to build consensus with internal stakeholders.

Required skills

• Go
• Python
• Rust
• C++
• Kubernetes (scheduler, controllers, apiserver, large‑scale clusters)
• Distributed systems engineering