Staff+ Software Security Engineer

Staff+ Software Security Engineer

San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA

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 Team

The Security Engineering team protects Anthropic's AI systems and maintains the trust of our users and society. We define the authentication architecture for our training infrastructure, design the cryptographic foundations that protect model weights and training data, and drive the developer security program that shapes how engineers build and ship software.

The team works across several areas that collaborate closely: identity and secrets management, developer security and supply chain, infrastructure security, and secure frameworks. You will own one or two of these areas and contribute to others, with your focus shaped by your strengths and the team's priorities. This is largely greenfield work, and you will help define the architecture.

About the Role:

• Scope, design, and build complex security systems end to end, maintaining them through production and driving through ambiguous technical challenges with minimal oversight
• Identify systematic risks through threat modeling and risk assessment, then build the controls and infrastructure that address them
• Mentor engineers across the security team and broader engineering organization, contribute to hiring, and grow security engineering culture at Anthropic
• Enable other teams to build their own security solutions by providing design pattern guidance and expanding security ownership beyond the security team

Developer security and supply chain

• Build and advance our developer security program by embedding security practices into the software development lifecycle and developer workflows
• Harden CI/CD pipelines against supply chain attacks through isolated build environments, signed attestations, dependency verification, and automated policy enforcement

Identity and secrets management

• Architect systems that protect sensitive assets including model weights, customer data, and training datasets
• Build and operate credential issuance, rotation, and workload authentication across our multi-cloud environments

Infrastructure security

• Implement and maintain cloud security controls including IAM, network segmentation, VPC architecture, and encryption across our multi-cloud and on-prem environments
• Contribute to cluster security controls including RBAC policies, namespace isolation, workload identity, and pod security
• Contribute to continuous cloud security posture management using infrastructure-as-code scanning, misconfiguration detection, and automated remediation

Secure frameworks

• Build critical security foundations including cryptographic frameworks, mTLS infrastructure, secure serialization, and authorization systems, designed to prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities and empower engineering teams to work securely without becoming security experts themselves
• Partner with product, research, infrastructure, and other security teams to ensure frameworks integrate smoothly with lower-layer security controls

You May Be a Good Fit If You Have:

• At least 8 years of software engineering experience with deep security expertise, including leading complex security initiatives independently
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent industry experience
• Strong programming skills in Python or at least one systems language such as Go, Rust, or C/C++
• Deep understanding of identity systems, cryptographic primitives, and secrets management
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes security primitives including RBAC, namespaces, network policies, and service accounts
• Experience leading cross-functional security initiatives and navigating complex organizational dynamics
• Outstanding communication skills, translating technical concepts effectively across all levels of the organization
• A track record of bringing clarity and ownership to ambiguous technical problems and driving them to resolution
• Low ego and high empathy, with a history of growing the engineers around you and supporting diverse, inclusive teams
• Passion for AI safety and the role security engineering plays in building trustworthy AI systems

Strong Candidates May Also Have:

• Designed or operated identity and secrets management systems for large-scale AI or cloud infrastructure
• Built security frameworks or libraries adopted across an engineering organization
• Led a developer security program including supply chain security, secure build infrastructure, and SDLC integrations
• Built or secured CI infrastructure using Nix, Bazel, or Kubernetes-based deploy systems, with depth in toolchain issues, CI/CD pipelines, and developer workflow optimization
• Implemented machine identity or workload authentication systems using SPIFFE/SPIRE, mTLS, or equivalent
• Understanding of Linux systems internals including namespaces, cgroups, and seccomp, and how these underpin container and workload isolation
• Contributed to the security architecture of multi-cloud environments including network segmentation, data protection, and access governance
• Experience with network security controls including admission controllers, CNI-level policy, service mesh security, and east-west traffic enforcement
• Experience building runtime security monitoring using eBPF or kernel security policies

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

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 aren't 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 you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're 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 from @anthropic.com email addresses. In 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 you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

How We're Different

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.

Come Work With Us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and