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Principal Engineer Capacity/Compute

Anthropic· Software Engineering - Infrastructure
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San Francisco, CA$320k - $485kFull-timePosted 6d ago

About the role

Engineer on Anthropic's Capacity Engineering team responsible for building production systems to manage, measure, and optimize the organization's large and growing infrastructure fleet across multiple clouds and regions. Focus areas include data pipelines, observability, performance instrumentation, and forecasting to maximize utilization and manage compute spend.

Responsibilities

  • Build the planning and allocation stack — tools to allocate capacity, planning against allocations, and scheduler enforcement; 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 gaps.
  • Own attribution and forecasting — reconcile billing across providers against telemetry and internal systems, attribute spend to workloads, and translate demand signals 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 ownership of completeness, latency SLOs, and gap detection.
  • Operate Kubernetes-native systems at scale — collection agents, workload labeling, and scheduling/taint-reservation behavior to determine usable capacity.
  • Treat the output as a product: gather requirements, define schema contracts, design for diverse consumers, include on-call and SLOs.

Qualifications

  • Strong track record building and operating production systems (devops flavor).
  • Python and SQL at production quality (Python for pipelines, BigQuery SQL for presentation layer).
  • Deep experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and its operations.
  • Experience with observability tooling stack (Prometheus, PromQL, Grafana) including recording rules and monitoring relied upon by engineering teams.
  • Ability to gather requirements and work across organizational boundaries in an ambiguous environment.

Skills

Required:Production system design and operationPythonSQL / BigQueryCloud platforms
Nice to have:Observability tooling
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Anthropic

building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

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