Hardware Systems Architect

Responsibilities

• Own system path-finding and architecture across Anthropic’s compute deployments, from concept and requirements through specification, design review, and deployment.
• Write and own high-level system, board, interface, and rack requirements and specifications.
• Review partner and vendor designs, make build, buy, and co-design decisions, and identify misalignment or schedule risks.
• Drive interconnect and networking architecture for scale-up and scale-out fabrics, NICs, switches, optics, and topology.
• Drive board, chassis, and system architecture, including component placement, PCB architecture, connector and cable design, and power and thermal budgets.
• Develop performance simulations, hardware models, and what-if scenarios to evaluate hardware architectures.
• Define validation, bring-up, and qualification strategies, including fleet telemetry and reliability targets.
• Track technology roadmaps and vendor landscapes.
• Partner with ML performance, infrastructure software, supply chain, datacenter, and hardware vendor teams.
• Develop AI-assisted approaches to design, specification review, and validation.

Requirements

• Deep, hands-on expertise in at least one core hardware-systems domain, such as interconnect, power, or thermal engineering, for large-scale compute or networking systems.
• Experience owning hardware system architecture at machine, rack, row, and cluster scale.
• Experience authoring specifications and requirements.
• Experience taking hardware from architecture through bring-up and high-volume production deployment.
• Experience working with external hardware vendors and partners and reviewing their designs against specifications.
• Ability to reason about trade-offs across interconnect, power, thermal, and mechanical domains.
• Track record of technical leadership and ownership of directional decisions.
• Ability to drive alignment across teams and partners.
• Comfort operating autonomously in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment.
• Strong written communication skills.
• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Nice-to-haves

• 8+ years in hardware systems architecture or engineering for hyperscale, HPC, AI/ML, or high-end networking platforms.
• Experience with AI accelerator systems, including GPU, TPU, or custom ASIC platforms, and their scale-up and scale-out fabrics.
• Familiarity with chip-package-system interfaces and co-design.
• Experience establishing a new function, program, or engineering practice.
• Experience using AI tools in engineering workflows.
• Expertise in high-speed SerDes, PCIe/CXL, Ethernet/InfiniBand, optical interconnect, BMC and platform firmware, hardware root of trust, secure boot, 48V/HVDC power delivery, direct liquid cooling, fleet-scale reliability engineering, RAS architecture, signal integrity, or power integrity.

Representative Projects

• Define scale-up and scale-out interconnect architecture for next-generation training platforms.
• Architect management and control planes, including BMC and host control, power and reset sequencing, secure boot, attestation, and fleet telemetry.
• Own rack-level power and thermal architecture for liquid-cooled accelerator racks.
• Build reliability models and RAS strategies for multi-thousand-node fleets.
• Evaluate partner system designs against requirements and drive corrective changes.
• Prototype AI-assisted workflows for partner design review and specification consistency checking.

Compensation and Benefits

• Annual salary range: $320,000–$485,000 USD.
• Anthropic expects staff in an office at least 25% of the time under its location-based hybrid policy.
• Visa sponsorship is available for eligible roles and candidates.