Data Center Electrical Engineer – Design

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 Training and serving frontier AI models requires compute infrastructure at a scale and density that pushes past what conventional data center designs were built to handle. Anthropic's Data Center Infrastructure team is responsible for delivering that physical infrastructure — partnering with build partners, equipment manufacturers, and utilities to stand up facilities that can reliably power some of the largest accelerator clusters in the industry. As a Data Center Electrical Engineer – Design, you'll own the electrical architecture of our facilities from the utility service entrance through to the rack — substation interface, medium- and high-voltage distribution, on-site generation and storage integration, UPS, switchgear, busway, and rack power. You'll develop and maintain the basis of design, reference architectures, and technical specifications that our build partners and A/E firms design against, and you'll be the point of technical authority when their drawings and calculations come back for review. You'll run the engineering studies — short-circuit, protection coordination, arc flash, load flow, and power quality — and you'll keep the architecture ahead of rapidly increasing rack densities and the unique load characteristics of large-scale ML training. A central part of this role is speed-to-capacity through prefabrication: you'll shape Anthropic's offsite-manufactured electrical strategy — modular skids, e-houses, and prefabricated power assemblies — and drive its standardization across sites. You'll work closely with colleagues across the infrastructure team, with our hardware and compute teams to translate accelerator requirements into electrical design criteria, and with supply chain to qualify and diversify regional equipment vendors. Expect roughly 10–25% travel for design reviews, partner and vendor meetings, factory witness testing, and site visits to support commissioning and startup. Responsibilities Electrical design & engineering • Lead the electrical design of critical data center infrastructure across the US portfolio, including the utility interface and substation, site medium- and high-voltage distribution, generators, UPS, switchgear, transformers, busway, and grounding • Develop and maintain Anthropic's electrical basis of design, reference architectures, and technical specifications for critical power distribution — covering switchgear, UPS systems, PDUs, busway, and rack power delivery — producing designs that meet our reliability and maintainability requirements while staying within budgetary targets • Perform and validate engineering studies — including short-circuit, protection coordination, arc flash, load flow, and power quality analysis — and use the findings to steer topology, redundancy, equipment-selection, and protection-setting decisions • Design and plan data center hall power distribution layouts for newly allocated spaces in coordination with the telecom, mechanical and cooling design Prefabrication & modular delivery • Drive Anthropic's prefabricated and modular electrical strategy — developing modular skids, e-houses, and prefabricated power assemblies, and partnering with external engineering and manufacturing teams on a productization roadmap that accelerates deployment and reduces onsite labor • Design for offsite manufacture and onsite assembly: define the interfaces between prefabricated components and site-built work, and the electrical interfaces and switchover points for temporary-to-permanent power sequencing • Drive standardization of modular electrical designs across sites to compress deployment timelines while preserving flexibility for site-specific constraints and evolving hardware generations Partner, vendor & utility coordination • Work with regional vendors and manufacturers to specify and qualify major electrical equipment, and partner with supply chain to build a diversified vendor base that mitigates lead-time and single-source risk • Work with utilities and interconnection/transmission operators (e.g., ISOs/RTOs) to define site utility service and interconnection requirements, and with local authorities having jurisdiction to ensure designs comply with the National Electrical Code (NFPA 70/NEC), NFPA, IEEE, UL/ANSI, and local requirements • Work with Anthropic's hardware and compute teams to translate accelerator power, density, and power-quality requirements into electrical design criteria, and keep the reference architecture aligned with upcoming hardware generations • Present findings and design positions to internal stakeholders, build partners, and operations teams through clear reports and presentations, and defend them under challenge Design review & quality • Review and approve electrical design packages, calculations, submittals, and shop drawings from build partners and MEP consultants; track clarifications, deviations, and exceptions against the basis of design, and hold the line on capacity, reliability, maintainability, and safety requirements • Perform technical due diligence and design reviews on data center developer and partner projects — evaluating their electrical single-lines, equipment selections, studies, and specifications against Anthropic's reliability, maintainability, and capacity requirements • Define project electrical scope and serve as the design authority on RFIs and field changes that affect design intent during procurement and construction • Support factory acceptance testing, commissioning, and startup — reviewing test procedures and results against design intent, participating on site for key milestones