Engineering Manager, Networking

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