Field Engineer, Data Center Design and Engineering

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

Anthropic's compute runs on a growing global portfolio of data centers built with development partners. As a Senior Field Engineer on the Data Center Design and Engineering team, you will work side by side with developers, general contractors and engineers of record to resolve technical issues on site and speed up construction. You will spend most of your time on active sites, acting as our team's eyes, voice and technical judgment in the field. You will spot problems first, get the right people moving, and stay with each issue until it is closed.

 

You don't need a data center background. We care more about whether you have delivered complex industrial projects from the field and can get contractors and partners to act when you have no formal authority over them.

What you'll do

Be our engineering presence on site. You will walk installed work against the approved design and build working relationships with developers, general contractors, engineers of record, vendors and commissioning teams. You will hold design acceptance on our team's behalf, deciding whether installed work meets the design. When field conditions and drawings disagree, you will be the first call. You will settle what you can on the spot and bring in the right discipline engineer for the rest. More than 50% of your working time will be at project sites, often with overnight travel across multiple sites. The rest will be remote from your home base.

Get issues closed. You will keep one prioritized list of open engineering issues for your sites, each with an owner and a date. You will follow up in person, challenge dates that don't hold up, and escalate early with a clear recommendation when something is stuck.

Find out why things fail. When equipment, an installation or a test fails, you will gather the evidence, test the first explanation, and trace the failure to its underlying cause. You will confirm that the fix works and check whether other sites carry the same risk.

Clear the path to commissioning and handover. You will check the interfaces between power, cooling, controls and structure before they surface as test failures. You will drive RFIs, deviations and field changes to decisions, so that open engineering questions don't hold up the crews.

Bring the field back into the design. You will turn recurring site problems into changes to our designs, standards and audit checklists. Each project should make the next one easier to deliver.

What this role is not

You won't manage construction crews or direct contractors' means and methods; those stay with our construction delivery partners. You will work with our discipline engineers and hold the field view, rather than produce design documents.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have spent years on active project sites in energy, power, heavy industrial, data center or similar environments, as an engineer, project manager, or construction or commissioning lead

• Can read drawings, single-line diagrams, P&IDs, specifications and schedules well enough to see where they disagree with what's been installed

• Can give specific examples of persuading contractors, vendors or partners who didn't report to you to change course

• Hold your position under pressure, back it with evidence, deliver bad news early, and change your mind when the facts change

• Have led structured failure investigations, using a method such as 5 Whys or 8D, and seen the corrective actions through

• Write short, factual reports that a busy reader can act on

• Treat safety as your own job, and will stop work that isn't safe

• Have a degree in engineering, construction management or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience as an owner's representative overseeing an EPC or general contractor

• Commissioning, startup or system turnover experience

• Worked in LNG, refining, offshore, power generation, semiconductor or naval environments

• An electrical, mechanical or civil, structural and architectural (CSA) engineering background

• A PE license, PMP or OSHA 30 certification

• Familiarity with tools such as Procore or Primavera P6

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:

$320,000—$405,000 USD

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.

For roles performing work in California: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records or criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.

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 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.