Data Center Mechanical Engineer

The posting, as Anthropic wrote it

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

Training and serving frontier AI models requires compute infrastructure at a scale and density that pushes past what conventional data center designs were built to handle. Anthropic’s Data Center team is responsible for delivering that physical infrastructure — partnering with build partners, equipment manufacturers, and vendors to stand up facilities that can reliably cool some of the largest accelerator clusters in the industry.

As a Senior Data Center Mechanical Engineer based in the United States, you’ll lead the design direction and technical oversight of building mechanical systems — cooling, chilled-water distribution, liquid cooling, plumbing, and fire protection — across our rapidly expanding U.S. portfolio. This is a senior individual contributor role focused on driving and reviewing mechanical design from concept through detailed design and construction documentation produced by external engineering firms and development partners, ensuring every facility meets Anthropic’s standards for reliability, efficiency, and scalability. You’ll own the mechanical design direction from Basis of Design through construction and commissioning, serving as the primary technical interface between Anthropic’s internal teams and our external engineering and development partners.

A central part of this role is speed-to-capacity through prefabrication and modular construction — modular cooling skids, prefabricated piping assemblies, and design for offsite manufacture that compress schedules and reduce onsite labor. You’ll bring deep familiarity with U.S. mechanical, plumbing, and fire codes and the local regulatory environment, and ensure the cooling architecture keeps pace with rapidly increasing rack densities and the shift toward direct-to-chip liquid cooling. Strong candidates will bring deep mission-critical mechanical design experience and the judgment to make sound trade-offs when the standard playbook doesn’t apply.

Responsibilities

Design direction & review

Drive mechanical design concepts for data center cooling plants, chilled-water distribution, liquid cooling (direct-to-chip and CDUs), plumbing, and fire protection systems.

Review and direct design drawings, specifications, and construction documentation produced by external engineering firms, ensuring alignment with Anthropic’s Basis of Design and owner requirements.

Evaluate design submittals, shop drawings, and equipment selections; respond to RFIs with clear technical direction.

Identify design conflicts and drive resolution across mechanical, electrical, and controls disciplines.

Maintain and evolve Anthropic’s inter
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n our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.