A
Staff+ Software Security Engineer
full-time
lead
About this role
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 u