Hardware Lab Manager

About the Team

Foragers is a new Field Services team within our physical infrastructure organization. We're the boots on the ground for Anthropic's physical infrastructure: the people who get hardware into racks, gear commissioned, and sites handed over. The team is being stood up now, so early hires shape how we operate. This role is the lab-focused counterpart to our traveling field engineers. Instead of covering sites across the country, you own our Bay Area hardware labs from end to end.

About the Role

Your mission is to ensure our hardware labs are functional, useful, and ready to support the growing number of teams and projects that need access to physical hardware. You’d own what shows up, how it’s powered, cooled, cabled, tracked, set up, and made functional. This includes both standard hardware (think typical accelerator setups) and more specialized ones like ensuring our security teams have access to all the right headers and other hardware instrumentation on the machines.

Understanding and anticipating the needs of the various teams that rely on the labs will be another critical part of this role. You’ll be expected to take a lot of ownership and initiative over the lab and what’s in it, including reaching out to partner teams to figure out what they’d need in the future and making sure it’s there before it starts to block them. This will require you to collaborate closely with those partner teams, so a breadth of knowledge around hardware is extremely useful.

You’d be the first dedicated lab manager, so part of this role will include shaping it to scale from our current lab to much larger ones.

What You’ll Do

• Run the physical lab across both sites: receiving and staging, rack-and-stack, cabling, power distribution and load planning, cooling, floor layout
• Bring up new server and accelerator platforms as they arrive, from crate to a machine someone can SSH into: firmware and BIOS/UEFI setup, out-of-band management, OS install, network provisioning
• Own hardware procurement for the lab: work with teams on what's coming, order ahead of need, chase quotes and lead times, keep receiving and inventory in order
• Own RMA processes end-to-end for lab hardware: triage, swap, ship, track, close; drive vendor escalations
• Build the one-off setups engineers ask for: debug and programming harnesses (JTAG/SWD/UART), remote power switching, console and KVM access, and the occasional improvised fix for hardware running outside the conditions it was designed for
• Oversee smarthands and contractor work on-site (electricians, cabling crews, riggers, integrators, OEM field engineers): scope it, dispatch it, validate the quality
• Handle physical access, asset auditing, and lifecycle tracking for hardware that is expensive and sometimes pre-release
• Write it down: build the playbooks and lightweight tooling (inventory, remote power, console access) so remote teams can use the lab without pinging you for every step

Who You Are

• Hands-on experience running a hardware, systems, or datacenter lab, or a similar physical compute environment: rack-and-stack, copper and fiber cabling, power distribution (PDUs, circuits, phase balancing)
• Working knowledge of server hardware and its management plane: BMC/IPMI/Redfish, BIOS/UEFI configuration, serial console, PXE/network boot, firmware updates
• Enough Linux and networking (VLANs, DHCP, DNS, basic switch config) to take a bare machine to a state a remote engineer can use
• Have managed vendors, contractors, quotes, and freight for physical equipment
• Comfortable and safe with power tools, bench power supplies, and a wiring or rack elevation diagram
• Work independently with minimal supervision , and know when to ask
• Bias toward action and comfort with ambiguity: you'd rather move and adjust than wait for perfect information
• Communicate clearly and directly, especially when flagging risks or blockers

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Stood up a lab or datacenter room from empty: layout, power and cooling budget, first round of purchasing
• Time around high-density accelerator systems (GPU/TPU-class racks), liquid cooling, or pre-release/NPI hardware bring-up
• Electronics bench skills: soldering and rework, scope and multimeter, custom cable and debug harnesses, JTAG probes, light fabrication (3D printing, drilling, mounting)
• Supported hardware security, firmware, or platform bring-up work
• Experience with DCIM or asset-management tooling (NetBox, ServiceNow, etc.)
• Bought hard-to-source or specialty hardware and dealt with the compliance and logistics that come with it

Location

This role is based in our San Francisco office (500 Howard St). Travel to nearby lab spaces is required so expect to be in-office more frequently than Anthropic's standard 25% hybrid baseline.

Annual Salary: 320000 - 405000 USD