Staff+ Software Security Engineer

Job Overview

As a Staff+ Software Security Engineer at Anthropic, you will play a crucial role in protecting the company's AI systems and maintaining user trust. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation focused on creating reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

Responsibilities

Security Engineering

• Design, build, and maintain complex security systems end-to-end, addressing ambiguous technical challenges with minimal oversight.
• Identify systematic risks through threat modeling and risk assessment, and develop controls and infrastructure to mitigate them.
• Mentor engineers across the security team and broader engineering organization, contributing to hiring and growing security engineering culture.
• Enable other teams to build their own security solutions by providing design pattern guidance and expanding security ownership.

Developer Security and Supply Chain

• Develop and advance the developer security program by integrating security practices into the software development lifecycle and workflows.
• Enhance CI/CD pipelines against supply chain attacks using isolated build environments, signed attestations, dependency verification, and automated policy enforcement.

Identity and Secrets Management

• Architect systems to protect sensitive assets, including model weights, customer data, and training datasets.
• Build and operate credential issuance, rotation, and workload authentication across multi-cloud environments.

Infrastructure Security

• Implement and maintain cloud security controls, including IAM, network segmentation, VPC architecture, and encryption across multi-cloud and on-prem environments.
• Contribute to cluster security controls, including RBAC policies, namespace isolation, workload identity, and pod security.
• Participate in continuous cloud security posture management using infrastructure-as-code scanning, misconfiguration detection, and automated remediation.

Secure Frameworks

• Develop critical security foundations, including cryptographic frameworks, mTLS infrastructure, secure serialization, and authorization systems.
• Collaborate with product, research, infrastructure, and other security teams to ensure smooth integration with lower-layer security controls.

Requirements

• 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.

Nice to 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 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.

Logistics

• Annual Salary: $405,000-$485,000 USD
• Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time.
• Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas and will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa if offered the role.