Network Engineer, Capacity and Efficiency

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 

The Capacity & Efficiency team sits inside Anthropic’s Compute organization and owns the cost, utilization, and attribution story for non-accelerator infrastructure — the network, compute, and storage backbone that moves petabytes between training clusters, inference fleets, and object storage across clouds and regions. Anthropic runs a private multi-cloud backbone built from dark fiber, optical transport, and CSP direct-connect products, layered over data center fabrics spanning tens of thousands of hosts. The scale is real, the spend is large, and the efficiency levers are still mostly unpulled.

We work alongside the Systems Networking team (who build and operate the fabric) and the Observability team (who own the telemetry platform). This role lives at the intersection: you’ll use deep networking knowledge and rigorous measurement to figure out where and how bandwidth, latency, and dollars are being used, find optimization opportunities and land them.

About the role

We’re looking for a network engineer who thinks in metrics first. You understand spine-leaf fabrics, BGP, SDN overlays, and cloud interconnect products well enough to build them. You will instrument them, model their cost-per-bit, and squeeze out the inefficiency, while ensuring we can move the bits to the right places in the most efficient manner. You’ll own the observability and efficiency surface for Anthropic’s network: from per-flow telemetry on backbone routers, to QoS policy on cross-region links carrying inference traffic, to cost attribution that tells a research team exactly what their checkpoint sync is costing.

This is a hands-on IC role. You’ll write code (Python, Go), build dashboards, model capacity, and ship config changes to production routers. You’ll also influence architecture: when the data says a traffic pattern is pathological, you’ll be in the room root causing it and fixing it. 

You will be working across three areas: network telemetry and observability, traffic engineering, and cost modeling and attribution. We expect you to be strong in at least two and willing to grow into the third. If you're a telemetry-first engineer who's never built a chargeback model, or a traffic engineer who hasn't shipped eBPF probes, apply anyway and tell us which axis you want to grow on.

What you’ll do

• Build the network observability stack. Design and deploy telemetry pipelines — sFlow/IPFIX, gNMI streaming, eBPF host probes — that turn packet counters into per-flow, per-tenant, per-workload cost and utilization data. Own the SLIs for backbone and DCN fabric health.

• Hunt for efficiency. Analyze inter-region traffic patterns, identify hot links and stranded capacity, and quantify the dollar impact. Build the models that tell us whether we should buy more capacity, or move the workload.

• Own QoS and traffic engineering. Design and operate traffic classification, marking, and shaping across the backbone. Make sure bulk checkpoint transfers don’t starve latency-sensitive inference, and that we’re not paying premium cross-region rates for traffic that could take the cheap path.

• Drive cost attribution. Tie network spend — egress, interconnect ports, transit, optical leases — back to the teams and workloads that generate it. Make network cost a first-class input to capacity planning and workload placement decisions.

• Influence decisions you don't own. A large fraction of this role is convincing other teams to act on what your data shows: making the case to research that a traffic pattern needs to change, to finance that an interconnect tranche is worth buying, to Systems Networking that a QoS policy needs rewriting. You'll partner closely with Systems Networking on fabric architecture and Observability on telemetry platform integration, but the cost and efficiency wins will come from moving teams that don't report to you.

• Automate. Extend our intent-based network configuration systems and write the tooling that turns your efficiency findings into safe, reviewable, and impactful changes.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have 5+ years operating large-scale production networks — data center fabrics (spine-leaf, Clos), backbone/WAN, or hyperscaler-adjacent environments. 

• Are genuinely fluent across the stack: BGP (including policy and communities), ECMP, VXLAN/EVPN or equivalent overlays, QoS (DSCP, queuing, shaping), and L1/optical basics (DWDM, coherent, LAGs).

• Know at least one major CSP’s networking model deeply — AWS (VPC, TGW, Direct Connect, Gateway Load Balancer) or GCP (Shared VPC, Interconnect, Cloud Router, Network Connectivity Center) — and understand how their overlays interact with physical underlays.

• Have built or operated network telemetry at scale: streaming telemetry (gNMI/OpenConfig), flow export (sFlow, IPFIX, NetFlow), or eBPF-based host-side instrumentation. You can reason about sampling, cardinality, and storage tradeoffs.

• Comfortable writing Python or Go to build tooling, telemetry pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, config management for network devices and automation, that you’ll ship to production.

• Think quantitatively by default. You reach for a notebook or a Grafana query before you reach for an opinion, and you can turn messy counter data into a defensible cost model.

• Communicate crisply. You can explain to a finance partner why a 10% egress reduction matters, and to a network engineer why a specific ECMP imbalance is costing real money.

Strong candidates may also have

• SRE experience for large-scale network infrastructure — designing for reliability, defining SLOs/SLIs for network services, capacity planning with error budgets, and incident response for network-impacting outages at scale.

• Background on a cloud provider's networking team or a cloud networking product team — building or operating the interconnect, backbone, or SDN control plane from the provider side, not just consuming it as a customer.

• Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure traffic patterns like collective communication (all-reduce, all-gather), checkpoint/weight transfer, inference serving, and how these stress networks differ than traditional workloads in terms of burst behavior, flow synchronization, and bandwidth symmetry.

• Experience with HPC fabrics like InfiniBand, RoCE v2, lossless Ethernet, or custom high-radix topologies and an understanding of how job placement, congestion management, and adaptive routing interact at scale.

• Background in traffic engineering for large backbones and the operational judgment to know when TE is worth the complexity.

• Hands-on time with multi-cloud connectivity: cross-cloud peering, private interconnect products, and the billing models that come with them.

• Experience building cost/chargeback systems for shared infrastructure, or FinOps exposure in a large cloud environment.

Representative projects

• Build a per-flow cost attribution pipeline that traces every byte of cross-region egress back to the team and workload that generated it

• Design QoS policy for the private backbone that prevents bulk checkpoint transfers from starving inference traffic

• Model whether it's cheaper to buy an additional 1.6Tb interconnect tranche or to re-route traffic through existing capacity

• Instrument DCN fabric utilization with streaming telemetry and build the Grafana dashboards that become the team's source of truth for network observability 

Why this role, why now

Anthropic’s network footprint is growing faster than our ability to reason about it. We’re turning up tens of terabits of private backbone capacity, peering across clouds, and moving model weights that keep getting larger. The efficiency opportunities are enormous and largely untouched — this is a chance to build the measurement and optimization layer from the ground up, with real budget impact and direct influence on how Anthropic’s infrastructure scales.

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed.  Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on 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