Data Center Mechanical Engineer

Anthropics 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.

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. Anthropics 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 youll 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 Anthropics standards for reliability efficiency and scalability. Youll own the mechanical design direction from Basis of Design through construction and commissioning serving as the primary technical interface between Anthropics 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. Youll 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 doesnt apply.

• 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 Anthropics 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 Anthropics internal mechanical design standards and reference configurations.

• Drive Anthropics 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 bachelors 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.

• 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.

Minimum education: Bachelors 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

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship:We do sponsor visas! However we arent able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if youre interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones were building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you some cases we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money fees or banking information before your first day. If youre ever unsure about a communication dont click any linksvisit for confirmed position openings.

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. Were 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.

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits optional equity donation matching generous vacation and parental leave flexible working hours and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates AI Usage:Learn aboutour policy for using AI in our application process.