Staff Software Engineer, Kubernetes Platform

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 CRDs
• Partner 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 causes
• A 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, ZooKeeper, Consul, or large DNS/service-mesh deployments)
• Familiarity with ML infrastructure: GPUs, TPUs, or Trainium; gang scheduling; topology-aware placement; collective networking such as NCCL
• Experience 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

Compensation & Benefits

• Annual Salary: $405,000—$485,000 USD
• Competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours