Hardware Lab Manager

About the Team:

Foragers is a new Field Services team within Anthropic's physical infrastructure organization. The team supports Anthropic's physical infrastructure by getting hardware into racks, commissioning gear, and handing sites over. This role is the lab-focused counterpart to traveling field engineers and owns the Bay Area hardware labs 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’ll own what shows up, how it’s powered, cooled, cabled, tracked, set up, and made functional. This includes standard hardware such as typical accelerator setups and specialized hardware instrumentation.

Understanding and anticipating the needs of the various teams that rely on the labs will be critical. You’ll take ownership and initiative over the lab and its contents, collaborate closely with partner teams, and help shape the role as the lab scales to larger facilities.

What You’ll Do:

• Run the physical lab across both sites: receiving and staging, rack-and-stack, cabling, power distribution and load planning, cooling, and floor layout
• Bring up new server and accelerator platforms from crate to a machine someone can SSH into, including firmware and BIOS/UEFI setup, out-of-band management, OS installation, and network provisioning
• Own hardware procurement for the lab, including planning purchases, obtaining quotes, managing lead times, receiving, and inventory
• Own RMA processes end-to-end for lab hardware: triage, swap, ship, track, close, and drive vendor escalations
• Build one-off setups such as debug and programming harnesses, remote power switching, console and KVM access, and improvised hardware fixes
• Oversee smarthands and contractor work on-site, including electricians, cabling crews, riggers, integrators, and OEM field engineers
• Handle physical access, asset auditing, and lifecycle tracking for expensive and sometimes pre-release hardware
• Build playbooks and lightweight tooling for inventory, remote power, and console access so remote teams can use the lab independently

Who You Are:

• Hands-on experience running a hardware, systems, or datacenter lab, or a similar physical compute environment
• Working knowledge of server hardware and its management plane, including BMC/IPMI/Redfish, BIOS/UEFI configuration, serial console, PXE/network boot, and firmware updates
• Enough Linux and networking knowledge to take a bare machine to a state a remote engineer can use
• Experience managing vendors, contractors, quotes, and freight for physical equipment
• Comfortable and safe with power tools, bench power supplies, and wiring or rack elevation diagrams
• Able to work independently with minimal supervision and know when to ask
• Bias toward action and comfort with ambiguity
• Clear and direct communication skills, especially when flagging risks or blockers

Strong Candidates May Also Have:

• Experience standing up a lab or datacenter room from an empty space
• Experience with high-density accelerator systems, liquid cooling, or pre-release/NPI hardware bring-up
• Electronics bench skills such as soldering, rework, oscilloscope and multimeter use, custom cables, debug harnesses, JTAG probes, and light fabrication
• Experience supporting hardware security, firmware, or platform bring-up work
• Experience with DCIM or asset-management tooling such as NetBox or ServiceNow
• Experience buying specialty hardware and managing related compliance and logistics

Come work with us!

Anthropic offers competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a collaborative office space.