Staff / Senior Physical Security Systems Engineer

Friendly (Travel Required) | San Francisco · Friendly US (Travel Required) · San Francisco · USD 320,000-405,000 / year · Posted Sep 29, 2026

At a glance

Location: Friendly (Travel Required) | San Francisco · Friendly US (Travel Required) · San Francisco
Salary: USD 320,000-405,000 / year · Base salary
Visa sponsorship: Visa sponsorship available

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.

Data Center Security Engineering (DCSE) secures Anthropic's data center footprint, covering how sites are designed and built to be secure.
This is a foundational role where you'll own Anthropic's physical security reference design package and keep it current against each site's threat basis.
The same seat covers the team's security operations control rooms, involving regular travel to data center sites and participation in an on-call rotation.

Produce a vendor-ready design package for perimeter barriers and hostile vehicle mitigation, intrusion detection and its zoning, video coverage, security lighting matched to camera performance, and penetration protection.
Define the per-site engineering basis: which requirements apply to a site based on its risk profile and the threats it faces, with compensating controls and documented deviations.
Write the acceptance criteria and test methods: the verification method behind each requirement and the evidence a site must produce to pass acceptance.
Set standoff, structural hardening, and site layout criteria for new designs, tied to the threat basis they derive from.
Run field verification: commissioning and acceptance testing of perimeter, detection, video, and lighting against performance criteria.
Write the operational and design requirements for security operations control rooms: console layout, wall versus workstation content, supervisor placement; room network, power, backup, and resilient communications.
Own control room acceptance: factory and site acceptance criteria written before the build, then accept or reject delivered systems against them.

Have designed or specified physical security systems for campus-scale sites: multiple buildings, a secured perimeter, many detection zones.
Read and produce construction documents using standard design and markup tools such as AutoCAD, Revit, or Bluebeam, and find what is missing as readily as what is wrong.
Write performance requirements that are testable: each states what must be true, how it will be verified, and what evidence shows it.
Have run commissioning and acceptance tests against performance criteria and rejected work that did not meet them.
Derive requirements from a threat basis rather than a product catalog.
Have owned an engineering domain where you set the approach, chose what applied to each site, worked directly with vendors, and answered for the result.
Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.
Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.

Experience carrying a physical security design from construction documents through construction to acceptance testing
Experience engineering the security scope of colocation or partner-delivered facilities
Working knowledge of published standards for standoff, hostile vehicle mitigation, and intrusion detection zoning
Photometric and video quality measurement experience
Control room, AV, or network design experience: console layouts, video wall systems, resilient communications
Experience using AI-assisted tooling for drafting and review as a core part of your workflow

Travel required
Location-based hybrid policy: currently expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time, though some roles may require more time