Data Center Mechanical 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 vendors to stand up facilities that can reliably cool some of the largest accelerator clusters in the industry. As a Senior Data Center Mechanical Engineer based in Sydney, you’ll lead the design direction and technical oversight of building mechanical systems — cooling, chilled-water distribution, liquid cooling, plumbing, and fire protection — across our rapidly expanding Asia Pacific (APAC) portfolio. This is a senior individual contributor role focused on driving and reviewing mechanical design from concept through detailed design and construction documentation produced by external engineering firms and development partners, ensuring every facility meets Anthropic’s standards for reliability, efficiency, and scalability. You’ll own the mechanical design direction from Basis of Design through construction and commissioning, serving as the primary technical interface between Anthropic’s internal teams and our external engineering and development partners. A central part of this role is speed-to-capacity through prefabrication and modular construction — modular cooling skids, prefabricated piping assemblies, and design for offsite manufacture that compress schedules and reduce onsite labor. You’ll bring deep familiarity with Australian mechanical, hydraulic, and fire codes and the local regulatory environment, and ensure the cooling architecture keeps pace with rapidly increasing rack densities and the shift toward direct-to-chip liquid cooling. Strong candidates will bring deep mission-critical mechanical design experience and the judgment to make sound trade-offs when the standard playbook doesn’t apply. Responsibilities Design direction & review · Drive mechanical design concepts for data center cooling plants, chilled-water distribution, liquid cooling (direct-to-chip and CDUs), plumbing, and fire protection systems. · Review and direct design drawings, specifications, and construction documentation produced by external engineering firms, ensuring alignment with Anthropic’s Basis of Design and owner requirements. · Evaluate design submittals, shop drawings, and equipment selections; respond to RFIs with clear technical direction. · Identify design conflicts and drive resolution across mechanical, electrical, and controls disciplines. · Maintain and evolve Anthropic’s internal mechanical design standards and reference configurations. Prefabrication & modular delivery · Drive Anthropic’s prefabricated and modular mechanical strategy — modular cooling skids, prefabricated piping and pump assemblies, and design for offsite manufacture and onsite assembly — to accelerate deployment and reduce onsite labor. · Drive standardization of modular mechanical designs across sites while preserving flexibility for site-specific constraints and evolving hardware generations. External partner & vendor coordination · Serve as the primary mechanical engineering point of contact for external developers, design engineers, and construction partners across the APAC portfolio. · Develop scopes of work, equipment specifications, and bid packages for mechanical infrastructure. · Perform technical due diligence on third-party and colocation facilities, evaluating mechanical designs against program requirements and redundancy targets. · Coordinate with equipment vendors and manufacturers on cooling system procurement, including chillers, CDUs, pumps, and piping assemblies, and partner with supply chain to mitigate lead-time and single-source risk. Construction & commissioning · Monitor mechanical system installation for compliance with design intent, Australian Standards, and industry best practice. · Conduct site visits to review progress, resolve field issues, and validate construction quality; travel to sites across the region as needed. · Support testing and commissioning of mechanical systems; analyze data and troubleshoot issues against design intent. You may be a good fit if you · Have 10+ years of experience designing building mechanical systems for data centers or mission-critical facilities, across the project lifecycle from concept design through construction, commissioning, and handover. · Have deep familiarity with Australian mechanical, hydraulic, and fire codes and standards — including the National Construction Code (NCC, incl. Section J energy efficiency), AS/NZS 1668.1 and AS 1668.2 (ventilation and fire/smoke control), AS/NZS 3500 (plumbing and drainage), AS 2118 (automatic fire sprinkler systems), AS/NZS 3666 (air-handling and water systems), and AS/NZS 5149 (refrigerating systems), alongside ASHRAE guidance (incl. TC 9.9). · Have strong knowledge of chilled-water systems, air-cooled cooling plants, liquid cooling (direct-to-chip and CDUs), and redundant piping configurations. · Have hands-on experience with prefabricated and modular mechanical infrastructure — modular cooling skids, prefabricated piping assemblies, and design for offsite manufacture. · Have experience driving and reviewing mechanical design work produced by external engineering consultants, and are proficient reading and marking up construction drawings, P&IDs, and single-line diagrams. · Hold a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering; RPEQ or CPEng registration (or eligibility) is valued but not required. · Communicate clearly and can drive technical decisions across internal teams and external partners, and are results-oriented with a bias toward practical solutions. · Are able to travel up to ~30% to data center sites across the region. Strong candidates may also have · 15+ years of experience designing building mechanical systems for data centers or mission-critical facilities. · Direct project experience delivering data centers in multiple APAC markets (e.g., Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, Korea). · Experience with thermal-hydraulic modeling software (AFT Fathom, Cadence 6SigmaET, ANSYS, or similar), CFD modeling, and energy analysis. · Familiarity with controls/BAS systems and sequences of operation for cooling plants. · Experience preparing SOWs, facility audits, and TCO analyses. · A track record building modular prefabricated products in mechanical or electrical areas of the data center, and driving designs toward offsite manufacturing. · Proficiency with Revit MEP or AutoCAD MEP. 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.