Staff+ Software Security Engineer

📋 Job Overview

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 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.

🎯 The Role

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.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• 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

📌 Required Qualifications

• 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

⭐ Desirable Experience

• 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

🎁 Benefits

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.

Annual Salary: $405,000 — $485,000 USD

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.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

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.