Application Security Engineer

Details

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.

This hands-on technical role on the Application Security team partners closely with software engineers and researchers to ensure security is considered from design through implementation. You will lead threat modeling and secure design reviews, build tooling to support secure development, and shape detection and defenses for emerging threats to AI/ML systems. The role requires a developer mindset, offensive-security thinking, and strong cross-functional collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Help secure AI products and internal tools that introduce novel security risks and push established security boundaries.
• Lead "shift left" security efforts to integrate security into the software development lifecycle.
• Conduct secure design reviews and threat modeling; identify and prioritize risks, attack surfaces, and vulnerabilities.
• Develop tooling to scale security code reviews and respond to developer questions; advise developers on remediations and secure coding practices.
• Manage Anthropic's vulnerability management program: integrate data ingestion pipelines, implement prioritization logic, support remediation, and build automated systems at scale.
• Oversee the bug bounty program: set scope, validate submissions, perform root cause analysis, coordinate remediation, and award bounties; cultivate relationships with the ethical hacker community.
• Collaborate closely with product engineers and researchers to instill security best practices and advocate for secure architecture and design.
• Develop and document security policies, standards, and playbooks; conduct security awareness training for engineers.

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in application and infrastructure security, including securing cloud-based and containerized environments.
• Strong proficiency in at least one programming language (examples listed: Python, Rust, Go, Java).
• Experience leading cross-functional security efforts with empathy and a collaborative mindset.
• Ability to reduce risk through secure design and simplicity; broad security knowledge across domains.
• Proactive mindset: threat modeling, secure code review, education, and threading security through product lifecycle.
• Strong grasp of offensive security to anticipate adversarial risks and go beyond compliance checks.
• Experience with modern application stacks, infrastructure, and security tools to implement pragmatic defenses.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to distill complex security concepts for broad audiences.

Strong candidates may also have

• Hands-on expertise securing complex cloud environments and microservices architectures using technologies like Kubernetes, Docker, and AWS/GCP.
• Exposure to offensive security techniques such as vulnerability testing, bug bounties, penetration testing, and red team exercises.
• Familiarity with AI/ML security risks (prompt injection, data poisoning, model extraction) and mitigations.
• Experience building security tools, applications, and automation at scale.
• Solid foundational knowledge of both software and security engineering principles and eagerness to continue learning.

Compensation

• Annual Salary: $300,000 - $405,000 USD

Logistics

• Education requirements: At least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.
• Location-based hybrid policy: Expectation that staff be in one of Anthropic's offices at least 25% of the time; some roles may require more time in offices.
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic states they do sponsor visas and retain an immigration lawyer to help, though sponsorship is not guaranteed for every role/candidate.

How we're different

Anthropic focuses on large-scale, collaborative AI research with high impact. The company values communication, cross-team collaboration, and pursuing steerable, trustworthy AI. Recent research directions include work related to GPT-3, interpretability, scaling laws, and learning from human preferences.

Benefits (selected)

Anthropic offers competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and office space for collaboration.