Hardware Lab Manager

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 Team

Foragers is a new Field Services team within our physical infrastructure organization. We're the boots on the ground for Anthropic's physical infrastructure: the people who get hardware into racks, gear commissioned, and sites handed over. The team is being stood up now, so early hires shape how we operate. This role is the lab-focused counterpart to our traveling field engineers. Instead of covering sites across the country, you own our Bay Area hardware labs from end to end.

About the Role

Your mission is to ensure our hardware labs are functional, useful, and ready to support the growing number of teams and projects that need access to physical hardware. You’d own what shows up, how it’s powered, cooled, cabled, tracked, set up, and made functional. This includes both standard hardware (think typical accelerator setups) and more specialized ones like ensuring our security teams have access to all the right headers and other hardware instrumentation on the machines.

Understanding and anticipating the needs of the various teams that rely on the labs will be another critical part of this role. You’ll be expected to take a lot of ownership and initiative over the lab and what’s in it, including reaching out to partner teams to figure out what they’d need in the future and making sure it’s there before it starts to block them. This will require you to collaborate closely with those partner teams, so a breadth of knowledge around hardware is extremely useful.

You’d be the first dedicated lab manager, so part of this role will include shaping it to scale from our current lab to much larger ones.

What You’ll Do

• Run the physical lab across both sites: receiving and staging, rack-and-stack, cabling, power distribution and load planning, cooling, floor layout
• Bring up new server and accelerator platforms as they arrive, from crate to a machine someone can SSH into: firmware and BIOS/UEFI setup, out-of-band management, OS install, network provisioning
• Own hardware procurement for the lab: work with teams on what's coming, order ahead of need, chase quotes and lead times, keep receiving and inventory in order
• Own RMA processes end-to-end for lab hardware: triage, swap, ship, track, close; drive vendor escalations
• Build the one-off setups engineers ask for: debug and programming harnesses (JTAG/SWD/UART), remote power switching, console and KVM access, and the occasional improvised fix for hardware running outside the conditions it was designed for
• Oversee smarthands and contractor work on-site (electricians, cabling crews, riggers, integrators, OEM field engineers): scope it, dis

[…]
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.