Data Center Substation, Protection & Automation Engineer

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. At the scale we build, our campuses are typically served by dedicated high-voltage substations and a medium-voltage distribution network that may also integrate on-site generation and battery energy storage — and the protection, control, and automation layer is what keeps all of it selective, coordinated, and observable.

As a Data Center Substation, Protection & Automation Engineer, you'll own the protection and automation architecture across Anthropic's US portfolio — from the utility point of interconnection (POI) through the HV/MV substation, the MV distribution loop, and down into LV switchgear. You'll develop and maintain our protection philosophy and reference relay settings, run and review the short-circuit, coordination, and arc-flash studies that underpin them, design the substation automation and SCADA architecture, and define how relays and meters integrate into the electrical power monitoring system (EPMS) — giving operators real-time visibility and sequence-of-events data when something trips. You'll also be our technical lead on the protection side of utility interconnection — working relay settings, transfer-trip, and ride-through requirements with transmission owners and ISOs/RTOs.

Protection engineering and substation automation are the core of this role; substation physical design is a strong plus but not a prerequisite — we'd like to hear from protection and P&C engineers who have spent their careers on relays, schemes, and studies even if they haven't owned a substation general arrangement. You'll work closely with colleagues across the infrastructure team, our build partners' A/E firms, relay and switchgear vendors, and utility protection groups. Expect roughly 20–35% travel for witnessing factory acceptance and relay testing, and supporting site energization and commissioning.

Responsibilities Protection engineering

Own Anthropic's protection philosophy and basis of design across the electrical system — HV substation, MV distribution, generator and energy-storage interties, and LV switchgear — and maintain the reference relay settings and protection one-line templates our build partners design against

Specify protective relays and develop relay settings for transformer, feeder, bus, generator, motor, and arc-flash protection applications, working across major platforms (e.g., SEL, GE Multilin, ABB, Siemens, Schneider)

Perform and critically review short-circuit, protective-device coordination, and arc-flash studies; use findings to steer equipment selection, settings, and incident-energy mitigation

Implement automatic transfer, load-shed, and restoration schemes in protection and automation logic, and make sure they stay secure and coordinated under every credible contingency

Review protection and control design packages, relay settings calculations, and coordination studies from build partners and A/E firms against our basis of design, and drive closure on deviations and exceptions

Substation automation & SCADA

Design the substation automation architecture for each site — IEC 61850 station and process bus, GOOSE messaging, RTUs/gateways, local HMI, sequence-of-events recording, and time synchr...