Staff+ Software Security Engineer

Details

Anthropic's Security Engineering team protects AI systems and maintains user and societal trust. The team defines authentication architecture for training infrastructure, designs cryptographic foundations protecting model weights and training data, and drives developer security programs across the organization. This role will own one or two security areas, contribute to others, and help define architecture in a largely greenfield environment.

Responsibilities

• Scope, design, and build complex security systems end to end, maintain them in production, and resolve ambiguous technical challenges with minimal oversight.
• Identify systematic risks through threat modeling and risk assessment, then build controls and infrastructure to address them.
• Mentor engineers, contribute to hiring, and grow security engineering culture.
• Enable other teams to build security solutions by providing design-pattern guidance and expanding security ownership.
• Advance developer security by embedding security practices into software development lifecycles and developer workflows.
• Harden CI/CD pipelines against supply-chain attacks using isolated build environments, signed attestations, dependency verification, and automated policy enforcement.
• Architect identity and secrets-management systems protecting model weights, customer data, and training datasets.
• Build and operate credential issuance, rotation, and workload authentication across multi-cloud environments.
• Implement cloud security controls including IAM, network segmentation, VPC architecture, and encryption across multi-cloud and on-premises environments.
• Contribute to Kubernetes cluster security, including RBAC, namespace isolation, workload identity, and pod security.
• Support continuous cloud security posture management through infrastructure-as-code scanning, misconfiguration detection, and automated remediation.
• Build security foundations including cryptographic frameworks, mTLS infrastructure, secure serialization, and authorization systems.
• Partner with product, research, infrastructure, and security teams to integrate frameworks with lower-layer security controls.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of software engineering experience with deep security expertise and experience leading complex security initiatives independently.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent industry experience.
• Strong programming skills in Python or a 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 and the ability to translate technical concepts across organizational levels.
• Demonstrated ability to bring clarity and ownership to ambiguous technical problems.
• Low-ego, empathetic leadership and a history of supporting diverse, inclusive teams.
• Passion for AI safety and the role of security engineering in trustworthy AI systems.

Additional Qualifications

• Experience designing or operating identity and secrets-management systems for large-scale AI or cloud infrastructure.
• Experience building security frameworks or libraries adopted across an engineering organization.
• Experience leading developer security programs involving supply-chain security, secure build infrastructure, and SDLC integrations.
• Experience securing CI infrastructure using Nix, Bazel, or Kubernetes-based deployment systems.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and developer workflow optimization.
• Experience implementing machine identity or workload authentication using SPIFFE/SPIRE, mTLS, or equivalent technologies.
• Understanding of Linux internals, including namespaces, cgroups, and seccomp, and their role in container and workload isolation.
• Experience contributing to multi-cloud security architecture, network segmentation, data protection, and access governance.
• Experience with 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 and Logistics

• Annual salary range of $405,000–$485,000 USD.
• Hybrid policy: staff are expected to work from one of the company's offices at least 25% of the time, with some roles requiring more office time.
• Anthropic sponsors visas for some roles and candidates and makes reasonable efforts to provide visa support, with assistance from an immigration lawyer.
• Benefits include competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and office collaboration space.