Engineering Manager, Networking

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

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to build and lead our Networking team—a small, high-leverage group responsible for the network infrastructure that connects our rapidly expanding compute capacity. With our recent $50 billion commitment to AI infrastructure and new data center sites coming online, this team is critical to enabling frontier AI research at scale.

This is a role with extraordinary scope and leverage. You'll own the entire networking problem for Anthropic—work that would be handled by five or six separate teams at a hyperscaler. The domain spans everything from lighting up fiber and configuring physical infrastructure to software-defined networking, cloud connectivity, and host networking. You'll be bootstrapping and maturing a team that currently operates more like an early-stage startup, establishing the charter, practices, and priorities as it grows.

As our capacity buildout proceeds at unprecedented pace, you'll help ensure ML teams can seamlessly use compute across AWS, GCP, and our own data centers without worrying about underlying network complexity. The interesting part is enabling the ML side of the business—if owning the whole problem and having outsized impact on our infrastructure investment sounds compelling, this role might be for you.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and lead the team: Recruit, develop, and retain a team of exceptional network engineers; establish team charter, practices, and priorities as the team matures
• Drive technical strategy: Partner with technical leads to prioritize work across WAN buildout, data center networking, cloud connectivity, and host networking—ensuring we're solving the right problems at the right time
• Ensure operational excellence: Mature the team's approach to reliability, observability, and incident response as the network becomes increasingly critical to research and production workloads
• Unblock research at scale: Enable ML teams to seamlessly use compute capacity across multiple cloud providers and our own data centers
• Communicate and coordinate: Serve as the bridge between the networking team and the broader organization—clearly articulating dependencies, risks, and progress to stakeholders
• Stay technically grounded: Maintain enough technical depth to understand your team's work, provide meaningful guidance, and credibly represent networking concerns in cross-functional discussions

About You

We're looking for a technical leader who thinks of themselves as a problem-solver and team-builder first. 

Minimum Requirements:

• 2+ years of experience as an Engineering Manager
• Experience building teams in environments with ambiguity and rapid change
• Strong technical foundation in networking: you can credibly discuss TCP/IP, BGP, routing architectures, and network debugging at a level that earns respect from senior ICs
• Experience across multiple networking domains—ideally touching at least two of: WAN, data center networking, host networking, cloud networking
• Ability to balance technical depth with pragmatic decision-making; you know when to dive deep and when to trust your team
• Strong communication skills—you can translate complex technical challenges into business terms and vice versa
• Comfort with end-to-end ownership in environments where best practices don't yet exist

Preferred Requirements:

• Experience at companies during periods of hypergrowth where you've scaled networking alongside the business
• Background in environments where you've worn multiple hats and worked across organizational boundaries
• Familiarity with both cloud provider networking (AWS, GCP) and on-premises/colo environments
• Experience working directly with internal users, cloud providers, and vendors to solve end-to-end networking problems
• Exposure to AI/ML infrastructure and the unique demands of large-scale distributed training

What makes a great fit:

• Leverage over headcount: You're more excited about owning a high-impact problem end-to-end than managing a large team; you see extreme leverage in a small team enabling massive infrastructure investment
• Generalist leader: You've avoided becoming narrowly specialized and can context-switch between physical infrastructure, software systems, vendor management, and technical strategy
• Builder mentality: You're energized by maturing a v0 into something robust rather than optimizing an already-mature system; you like establishing practices, not just following them
• Pragmatic technologist: You balance technical excellence with business outcomes; you care as much about unblocking research as you do about elegant network architectures
• High adaptability: You thrive working with strong, opinionated technical contributors and can navigate unconventional team structures with patience and good judgment
• Business-aware: You think about problems in terms of enabling the business—understanding how your team's work connects to training runs, cost optimization, and research velocity

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below. 

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$405,000-$485,000 USD

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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. 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