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Principal Engineer Capacity/Compute

Anthropic· Software Engineering - Infrastructure
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Seattle, WA$320k - $485kFull-timePosted 6d ago

About the role

Engineer on Anthropic's Capacity Engineering team building production systems to manage and optimize infrastructure capacity, telemetry pipelines, observability, and forecasting across multi-cloud environments.

Responsibilities

  • Build the planning and allocation stack — the tools leadership uses to allocate capacity, teams use to plan against their allocations, and the scheduler enforces. 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 the gaps. Utilization improvements are worth enormous sums at our scale.
  • Own attribution and forecasting — reconcile billing across ten-plus providers against telemetry and internal systems, attribute spend to the workloads that generate it, and turn demand signals and research roadmaps 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 real ownership of completeness, latency SLOs, and gap detection. Every new provider is a net-new integration.
  • Operate Kubernetes-native systems at scale — collection agents, workload labeling, and the taint/reservation/scheduling behavior that determines what capacity is actually usable.
  • Treat the output as a product, not a pipeline. Gather your own requirements, define schema contracts, and design for consumers ranging from research engineers to a CFO — including on-call and SLOs, because these surfaces are load-bearing for the company.

Qualifications

  • A strong track record building and operating production systems. This is a hands-on engineering role with a devops flavor.
  • Python and SQL at production quality. Most pipeline code is Python; the presentation layer is BigQuery SQL, including table-valued functions and views. Both need to be idiomatic, well-tested, and maintainable.
  • Deep experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and its operations
  • Experience with observability tooling stack, including Prometheus, PromQL, and Grafana, including writing recording rules and building monitoring that engineering teams rely on.
  • Ability to gather your own requirements and work across organizational boundaries in an ambiguous environment with limited direction.

Skills

Required:Production-grade PythonSQL / BigQueryCloud provider operationsObservability tooling

Benefits

  • Competitive compensation and benefits
  • Optional equity donation matching
  • Generous vacation and parental leave
  • Flexible working hours
  • Lovely office space in San Francisco (location-based)
  • Visa sponsorship support where possible
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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