Staff Engineer, Datacenter Server Lifecycle

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

As a Staff Engineer on the Datacenter Server Lifecycle team, you will own the end-to-end operational journey of every machine in our datacenters – from initial provisioning and deployment, steady-state operation, maintenance, and repair.

This is greenfield work: you will help define the services, tooling, standards and processes that govern how we operate critical hardware at scale, powering frontier model development and serving. You will have the opportunity to define AI-native workflows for datacenter operations and to help drive innovations on efficiency, performance, and reliability.

A distinguishing aspect of this role is its deep intersection with security. The machines in our datacenter handle some of the most sensitive workloads in AI – training frontier models and serving millions of users interacting with Claude. Ensuring that every machine in the fleet is trusted, attested, and operating with a verified chain of integrity from the hardware up is a core part of the job, not an afterthought. You will partner closely with our Infrastructure Security team to define and enforce trusted compute standards across the lifecycle, from secure provisioning through end-of-life handling.

Key responsibilities

• Build automation to support datacenter fleets at scale.
• Define and own the end-to-end system lifecycle strategy – from provisioning and deployment through operation, maintenance, refresh, and decommissioning – and maintain automation and operational procedures for common lifecycle events (e.g., hardware failures, firmware upgrades, fleet rotations).
• Partner closely with Infrastructure Security to design and enforce trusted compute standards across the server lifecycle.
• Work closely with our Networking team to ensure end-to-end connectivity across all sites.
• Build and maintain tooling to track machine health, configuration, and operational status across the full datacenter fleet.

Minimum qualifications

• Hands-on experience with server hardware, including rack deployment, cabling, troubleshooting, and understanding failure modes at scale.
• End-to-end understanding of hardware lifecycle management: asset tracking, provisioning workflows, maintenance scheduling, and decommissioning practices.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Rust, Go, or Java).
• Working knowledge of modern cloud infrastructure, includi