Staff + Software Security Engineer, Labs

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.

Frontier AI is on track to be among the most consequential and most adversarially-targeted technology in the world. The capability curve is steep, the adversaries who want these systems are extremely well-resourced, and the security bar this will eventually require is well beyond where the industry operates today. Incremental hardening alone is not going to close that gap, so we need breakthroughs and a group of people to go find them.

Security Labs is that team. We run a portfolio of high-risk, high-expected-value security projects: the work that seems impractical until someone optimistic and stubborn enough actually tries it. Projects run on the order of weeks rather than quarters, and each one is either handed off to the Anthropic team that will own it in production or wound down with a writeup of what we learned. We expect a meaningful fraction of our bets not to land.

This team is intentionally scrappy and ambitious. We're intentionally iterating fast on high-risk research bets and we expect a meaningful fraction not to land. If a 30% project success rate sounds uncomfortable, or uncharted and chaotic territory isn’t both frightening and exciting, this probably isn't the right fit. There are other places in Anthropic Security doing important work with more structure, less risk, and more certain paths to positive outcomes.

Who we're looking for. We're hiring generalists with rare depth. You're a strong software engineer as a baseline, and on top of that you've gone deep in at least one area most engineers don't get near: firmware or hardware security, applied cryptography, OS / kernel / hypervisor internals, formal methods, reverse engineering, or high-assurance and cross-domain systems. You've built things under your own direction, you're comfortable jumping layers when the problem demands it, and you'd rather take a swing at something that might not work than ship the safe incremental thing. You think the trajectory of AI matters a great deal, you're not comfortable with how the security side of it is going by default, and you'd rather be on the inside building the answer than watching from outside.

Current Project Areas

The portfolio changes as we learn. The kinds of bets currently in flight or queued:

Part of your job is deciding what comes next. We hire people we trust to pick good bets, and project selection is owned by the engineers doing the work.

Key responsibilities

Minimum qualifications

• Can our core research workflows survive extreme isolation?
• Can we replace trust with cryptographic guarantees?
• Can the models themselves become our most effective security control?
• What would it actually take to defend against a tier-1 state adversary, and how much of that can we build now?
• Standing up a prototype high-assurance research cluster: running real Anthropic training and research workloads under extreme isolation and physical security controls, and finding out exactly where productivity breaks and what we'd need to invent to get it back

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

• Experience inside airgapped or high-side environments (classified networks, cross-domain solutions, ICS/SCADA, financial trading infrastructure) and the operational realities of working in them
• A background in offensive security, red teaming, or vulnerability research, with calibrated intuitions for which threats actually matter
• Familiarity with ML infrastructure (training pipelines, distributed schedulers, inference serving, accelerator hardware) sufficient for grounded conversations with researchers about what their workloads actually need
• A history of working in environments built around rapid iteration rather than rigid change control: startups, applied research groups, independent consulting, small security shops

$320,000—$485,000 USD

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.