Staff + Software Security Engineer, Labs

San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA · San Francisco · USD 320,000-485,000 / year · Hybrid · Posted Oct 5, 2026

At a glance

Workplace: Hybrid
Location: San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA · San Francisco
Salary: USD 320,000-485,000 / 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.

Security Labs is a scrappy and ambitious team at Anthropic running high-risk, high-expected-value security projects on weekly timelines.
Projects involve building prototypes, testing them against real workloads, and either handing them off to production owners or documenting what was learned.

Own Security Labs projects end to end by scoping bets, building prototypes, running them against real workloads, and bringing them to hand-off or documented exit.
Stand up novel security infrastructure fast (isolated clusters, attestation chains, hypervisor and runtime work, verification tooling) optimizing for learning over permanence.
Find the receiving team early, bring them along while building, and hand them something they actually want to own.
Work embedded with research and infrastructure teams (Pretraining, RL, Inference, Compute) to test whether workflows survive proposed changes and document precisely where they don't.
Turn experimental results into short writeups that shape Anthropic's long-term security architecture and into costed contingency plans executable on short notice.
Help pick the next round of bets and influence the industry to improve along the way.

Genuinely care about where AI is heading and want to work on security problems that determine whether it goes well.
Have real depth in at least one area most software engineers don't touch (e.g. firmware or hardware security, applied cryptography, OS / kernel / hypervisor internals, formal methods and verification, reverse engineering and exploit development, or high-assurance / cross-domain systems).
Have built and shipped things under your own direction.
Have a track record of choosing the problem yourself and seeing it through rather than only executing a plan handed down by someone else.
Are comfortable jumping between domains and layers of the stack when the problem calls for it and have actually done so.
Have run prototypes or experiments where the goal was answering a hard question rather than shipping a permanent system, including ones that didn't pan out.
Write clearly enough to turn weeks of work into a couple of pages someone can act on.
Change your mind when evidence says to and be fine being the least-expert person in a room full of specialists.
Care about defense and want to spend time making systems hold up.
Are a strong programmer in Python plus at least one of Rust, Go, or C/C++ and can stand up real infrastructure.

Experience inside airgapped or high-side environments (classified networks, cross-domain solutions, ICS/SCADA, financial trading infrastructure) and the operational realities of working in them.
A background in offensive security, red teaming, or vulnerability research, with calibrated intuitions for which threats actually matter.
Familiarity with ML infrastructure (training pipelines, distributed schedulers, inference serving, accelerator hardware) sufficient for grounded conversations with researchers about what workloads actually need.
A history of working in environments built around rapid iteration rather than rigid change control: startups, applied research groups, independent consulting, small security shops.

Location-based hybrid policy expecting staff to be in one of the offices at least 25% of the time, though some roles may require more time in offices.

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