Platform Hardware Security

Anthropic; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 405,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship

Competitive compensation

Equity donation matching

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Office space

Job summary

Anthropic Limited in Seattle is seeking a Platform Hardware Security Engineer to design security architectures for bare-metal infrastructure and to build firmware, bootloaders, OS, and attestation systems. You will ensure integrity across the massive AI training fleet while balancing security and performance.

The role requires deep expertise in low-level security, cryptography, and firmware security, with strong collaboration across hardware and software teams.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with secure boot, measured boot, and attestation technologies.
• Strong understanding of cryptographic protocols and hardware security modules.
• Experience with UEFI/BIOS or embedded firmware security and chain of trust.
• Proficiency in C, Rust, Assembly and systems programming.
• Knowledge of firmware vulnerability assessment and threat modeling.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement secure boot chains from firmware through OS initialization.
• Architect attestation systems from hardware root of trust to application layer.
• Develop measured boot implementations and runtime integrity monitoring.
• Create reference architectures and security requirements for bare-metal deployments.
• Integrate security controls with infrastructure teams without impacting performance.
• Prototype and validate security mechanisms before production deployment.
• Conduct firmware vulnerability assessments and penetration testing.
• Build firmware analysis pipelines for continuous security monitoring.
• Document security architectures and maintain threat models.
• Collaborate with software and hardware vendors to meet security requirements.

Skills

Secure boot

Attestation tech

Cryptography

Low-level programming

Firmware security

Threat modeling

Distributed systems

Supply chain security

Cross-boundary collaboration

NIST guidelines

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

TPM

Intel TXT

AMD SEV

ARM TrustZone

Job description

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 Role

We're seeking a Platform Hardware Security Engineer to design and implement security architectures for bare-metal infrastructure. You'll work with teams across Anthropic to build firmware, bootloaders, operating systems, and attestation systems to ensure the integrity of our infrastructure from the ground up. This role requires expertise in low-level systems security and the ability to architect solutions that balance security requirements with the performance demands of training AI models across our massive fleet.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement secure boot chains from firmware through OS initialization for diverse hardware platforms (CPUs, BMCs, switches, peripherals, and embedded microcontrollers)
• Architect attestation systems that provide cryptographic proof of system state from hardware root of trust through application layer
• Develop measured boot implementations and runtime integrity monitoring
• Create reference architectures and security requirements for bare-metal deployments
• Integrate security controls with infrastructure teams without impacting training performance
• Prototype and validate security mechanisms before production deployment
• Conduct firmware vulnerability assessments and penetration testing
• Build firmware analysis pipelines for continuous security monitoring
• Document security architectures and maintain threat models
• Collaborate with software and hardware vendors to ensure security capabilities meet our requirements

Minimum Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with secure boot, measured boot, and attestation technologies (TPM, Intel TXT, AMD SEV, ARM TrustZone)
• Strong understanding of cryptographic protocols and hardware security modules
• Experience with UEFI/BIOS or embedded firmware security, bootloader hardening, and chain of trust implementation
• Proficiency in low-level programming (C, Rust, Assembly) and systems programming
• Knowledge of firmware vulnerability assessment and threat modeling
• Track record of designing security architectures for complex, distributed systems
• Experience with supply chain security
• Ability to work effectively across hardware and software boundaries
• Knowledge of NIST firmware security guidelines and hardware security frameworks

Preferred Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in systems security, with at least 5 years focused on firmware and hardware security (firmware, bootloaders, and OS-level security)
• Experience with confidential computing technologies and hardware-based TEEs
• Knowledge of SLSA framework and software supply chain security standards
• Experience securing large-scale HPC or cloud infrastructure
• Contributions to open-source security projects (coreboot, CHIPSEC, etc.)
• Background in formal verification or security proof techniques
• Experience with silicon root of trust implementations
• Experience working with building foundational technical designs, operational leadership, and vendor collaboration
• Previous work with AI/ML infrastructure security

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below. For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary

$320,000—$405,000 USD

Logistics

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

Minimum years of experience:

Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy:

Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship:

We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

How We're Different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.