Data Center Electrical Engineer

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 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 based in Japan, you’ll lead the electrical design of our facilities across our rapidly expanding Asia Pacific (APAC) portfolio — owning the architecture from the utility service entrance through to the rack. You’ll develop and maintain the reference designs and specifications our build partners work against, review their engineering submittals, and run the analysis needed to make confident decisions on topology, redundancy, and equipment selection. You’ll ensure the electrical architecture keeps pace with rapidly increasing rack densities and the unique load characteristics of large-scale ML training. This is a global role with a regional focus. You’ll bring fluency in the data center design conventions, codes, and supply markets of Japan, Korea, and the broader APAC region including Australia, and act as Anthropic’s on-the-ground electrical subject-matter expert with local utilities, agencies having jurisdiction, vendors, and contractors. It is also a highly cross-functional role: you’ll work with our hardware and compute teams to translate accelerator requirements into electrical design criteria, and with supply chain to qualify regional equipment vendors and create optionality in a constrained market. Strong candidates will bring deep mission-critical electrical design experience and the judgment to make sound trade-offs when the standard playbook doesn’t apply. Responsibilities Electrical design & engineering · Lead the electrical design of critical data center equipment across the APAC portfolio, including utility interface and substation, site-wide medium-voltage (MV) infrastructure, generators, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), switchgear, transformers, and earthing/grounding systems. · 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 or exceed our quality requirements while staying within budgetary targets. · Perform and validate engineering studies including short-circuit, coordination, arc flash, load flow, and power quality analysis; use findings to steer design decisions and equipment selection. · Read, interpret, and validate data center floor plans and technical drawings, and design and plan DC hall layouts for newly allocated spaces — including rack positioning, structured cabling, power distribution, and coordination with the cooling design. Partner, vendor & utility coordination · Review and approve electrical design packages, submittals, and shop drawings from build partners and MEP consultants, ensuring designs meet capacity, reliability, and maintainability requirements; review proposed technologies and clarify design justifications. · Work with regional vendors and manufacturers to specify the appropriate electrical equipment, and partner with supply chain to build a diversified vendor base, modular prefabricated units that mitigates lead-time and single-source risk. · Work with local utilities to understand and define site utility requirements, and with local agencies having jurisdiction to ensure compliance with IEC requirements, APAC-wide design codes, and other jurisdictional requirements. · Present findings and proposals to internal stakeholders and DCO teams through clear reports and presentations, and defend design positions when challenged. Delivery, construction & commissioning · Define project scope and provide technical support for information requests prior to and during construction; coordinate and oversee the implementation of data center infrastructure with vendors, contractors, and internal teams, ensuring work follows approved designs and complies with safety, regulatory, and operational standards. · Work with commissioning teams to test and validate the installation, operation, and performance of electrical systems; resolve field engineering issues and review test results against design intent. · Manage concurrent projects across multiple geographies, and travel to sites for design review, electrical systems audits, engineering evaluations, and startup support alongside onsite field engineers. · Contribute to the continuous improvement of Anthropic’s internal electrical design standards and delivery practices, and act as a leader within the global engineering group and across the internal and external teams that support our data centers. You may be a good fit if you · Have 10+ years of electrical engineering experience in mission-critical facilities, with substantial time spent on data center or other high-availability electrical distribution design across the project lifecycle — from concept design through construction, commissioning, and handover. · Speak, read, and write Japanese fluently, and can interpret Japanese technical documentation and communicate effectively with local utilities, authorities, vendors, and contractors. (This role requires Japanese-language proficiency.) · Are familiar with data center design conventions and regulatory/code regimes across Japan, Korea, and the broader APAC region including Australia, and comfortable designing to IEC standards and local jurisdictional requirements. · Hold a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field; PE/Chartered Engineer licensure is valued but not required. · Have hands-on experience producing and reviewing electrical construction documents, single-line diagrams, and equipment specifications, and can interpret data center schematics and technical layouts with confidence. · Have strong knowledge of rack layout, structured cabling, power distribution, and cooling infrastructure in high-availability data center environments. · Are fluent in power systems analysis and comfortable running or critically reviewing studies in tools such as SKM, ETAP, or EasyPower. · Understand critical power topologies (2N, N+1, distributed redundant, block redundant) and can articulate the trade-offs between them for different reliability and cost targets. · Have worked directly with electrical equipment manufacturers, vendors, and contractors, and can evaluate products on technical merit, not just datasheet claims. · Communicate clearly with both technical peers and non-specialist stakeholders, and are results-oriented, with a bias toward practical solutions and a willingness to pick up work outside your core remit when the team needs it. Strong candidates may also have · Direct project experience delivering data centers in multiple APAC markets (e.g., Japan, Korea, Australia, Singapore) and familiarity with regional codes and standards such as JIS/JEAC, alongside IEC, NFPA 70/70E, and the IEEE color book series. · Background in medium-voltage distribution, on-site generation, or energy storage integration. · Exposure to liquid-cooled infrastructure and its implications for electrical room layout and load distribution. · Prior work at a hyperscaler, colocation provider, or MEP consultancy serving large data center clients. · A background in banking or other mission-critical facilities. · Experience driving reference designs or standards adopted across multiple sites or by external partners. 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 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.