Data Center Design Execution Lead

Data Center Design Execution Lead

Remote-Friendly, United States

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

Anthropic's Infrastructure team is responsible for designing, delivering, and scaling the physical compute environments that power our AI research and products. The team sits at the intersection of internal customers and an ecosystem of external engineering, construction, and development partners. From site selection through design, construction, commissioning, and ongoing operations, Infrastructure ensures that Anthropic's datacenter footprint keeps pace with our research ambitions.

About the Role

We are looking for a Design Execution Manager to own the bridge between Anthropic's technical requirements and the third-party partners who bring our datacenters to life. This is not a pure design role or a pure project management role—it lives in the critical space between the two, ensuring that design follows the requirements, and that technical intent survives every handoff from concept through turnover.

Scope spans the full design lifecycle: concept, schematic, permitting, development, construction administration, commissioning, and operations. The right candidate thrives in environments where nimble but structured processes need to be built, not just followed, and is energized by the challenge of standing up execution frameworks across a rapidly growing portfolio of mission-critical facilities.

Responsibilities

Design Execution & Partner Oversight

• Drive execution of Anthropic's technical requirements for third-party datacenter delivery partners, ensuring design intent is consistently translated from BOD through construction documents.
• Define the design execution framework—deliverable requirements, review gates, and quality standards—for each partner engagement.
• Drive accountability for partner deliverable quality across milestones, evaluating deliverables for cross-discipline consistency and alignment to Anthropic's requirements.
• Partner with external design teams and stakeholders to execute design document development and issuance across all project phases.

Change Management & Technical Continuity

• Own the design change management process across projects, ensuring technical decisions are documented, resolved, and implemented through construction.
• Review and develop responses to contractor RFIs, maintaining design intent while accommodating field conditions.
• Own technical continuity across design, construction, commissioning, and turnover, driving alignment between internal leads on phase transition standards and acceptance criteria.
• Support project closeout and as-built documentation processes.

Constructability & Risk Management

• Facilitate constructability review processes between design and construction teams, identifying integration risks and maintaining alignment between design intent and field execution as conditions evolve.
• Identify and mitigate design risks; ensure robust QA/QC practices across the design and construction lifecycle.
• Perform project site reviews and deliver technical reports on design compliance and construction progress.

Cross-Functional Coordination

• Interface with internal stakeholders—construction execution, supply chain, facilities operations, and security—to align design solutions with technical and business objectives.
• Partner with internal teams to define infrastructure requirements and translate them into actionable design criteria for external partners.
• Identify and implement opportunities for process improvements, design optimization, and schedule/performance/cost tradeoffs.
• Review commissioning scripts and final reports to validate performance and functionality against Anthropic's standards.

Qualifications

Required

• 10+ years in datacenter or mission-critical infrastructure delivery, spanning design and delivery phases.
• Direct experience in owner's engineer or technical oversight roles—not purely design production or purely project management.
• Working knowledge of mechanical, electrical, and cooling systems in datacenter environments.
• Experience managing design change processes, RFIs, and construction documentation workflows.
• Track record of coordinating across multiple disciplines and organizations on complex infrastructure projects.
• Deep knowledge of industry standards, building codes, and safety standards applicable to mission-critical facilities.
• Comfortable operating with authority in ambiguous environments where processes need to be built, not just followed.
• BS in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Architecture, or related field.

Preferred

• Professional Engineer (PE) or Registered Architect (RA) license.
• Experience stamping construction drawing packages.
• Proficiency with Revit/BIM, Autodesk, or similar design software applications.
• Experience integrating sustainability, energy efficiency, and resiliency goals into datacenter system designs.
• Direct experience with large-scale AI/HPC infrastructure, including high-density cooling systems and power distribution at 50+ MW scale.

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