Red Team Engineer, Safeguards

Anthropic Limited; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 405,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic Limited in San Francisco is seeking a Red Team Engineer to identify vulnerabilities across our AI product ecosystem, using adversarial testing to simulate real-world threats.

You will build automated testing frameworks, collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Policy teams, and help establish metrics for detection of novel abuse. This role emphasizes safety and scale, with a focus on jailbreaking, prompt injection vectors, and guardrails beyond traditional security.

Qualifications

• Experience in penetration testing, red teaming, or application security.
• Experience in model jailbreaking and testing large-scale agentic workflows for non-obvious prompt injection vectors.
• Strong technical skills in web application security, including hands-on expertise with security testing tools (e.g., Burp Suite, Metasploit, custom scripting frameworks).
• Experience building custom automation, including LLM-specific testing frameworks.
• A track record of discovering novel attack vectors and chaining vulnerabilities in creative ways.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts to varied audiences.

Responsibilities

• Conduct comprehensive adversarial testing across Anthropic's product surfaces, developing creative attack scenarios that combine multiple exploitation techniques.
• Research and implement novel testing approaches for emerging capabilities, including agent systems, tool use, and new interaction paradigms.
• Design and execute "full kill chain" attacks that emulate real-world threat actors attempting to achieve specific malicious objectives.
• Build and maintain systematic testing methodologies that evaluate every aspect of our systems.
• Develop automated testing frameworks to enable continuous assessment at scale.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Policy teams to translate findings into concrete improvements.
• Help establish metrics for measuring detection effectiveness of novel abuse.

Skills

Penetration testing

Red teaming

Application security

LLM testing frameworks

Vulnerability research

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field

Tools

Burp Suite

Metasploit

Scripting frameworks

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.

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

Anthropic's Safeguards team is seeking a Red Team Engineer to help ensure the safety of our deployed AI systems and products. In this role, you'll take an adversarial approach to uncover vulnerabilities across our product ecosystem before they can be exploited by malicious actors. Your work will span from technical infrastructure vulnerabilities on our products to emergent risks from advanced AI capabilities.

While you'll bring best practices from traditional security approaches, the focus is on broader safety implications and novel abuse unique to advanced AI systems and associated products. You'll investigate the full spectrum of potential abuse — from coordinated account manipulation and payment fraud to novel exploitation of product features — and simulate sophisticated threat actors who chain multiple attack vectors to achieve their objectives.

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct comprehensive adversarial testing across Anthropic's product surfaces, developing creative attack scenarios that combine multiple exploitation techniques
• Research and implement novel testing approaches for emerging capabilities, including agent systems, tool use, and new interaction paradigms
• Design and execute "full kill chain" attacks that emulate real-world threat actors attempting to achieve specific malicious objectives
• Build and maintain systematic testing methodologies that evaluate every aspect of our systems
• Develop automated testing frameworks to enable continuous assessment at scale
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Policy teams to translate findings into concrete improvements
• Help establish metrics for measuring detection effectiveness of novel abuse

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience in penetration testing, red teaming, or application security
• Experience in model jailbreaking and testing large-scale agentic workflows for non-obvious prompt injection vectors
• Strong technical skills in web application security, including hands-on expertise with security testing tools (e.g., Burp Suite, Metasploit, custom scripting frameworks)
• Experience building custom automation, including LLM-specific testing frameworks
• A track record of discovering novel attack vectors and chaining vulnerabilities in creative ways
• A public body of work such as CVEs, blog posts, or disclosed bug bounty reportsStrong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts to varied audiences

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AI/ML security or adversarial machine learning
• Understanding of AI safety considerations beyond traditional security, including modern guardrails against jailbreaks
• Experience testing API security and rate-limiting systems
• Background in testing business logic vulnerabilities and authorization bypass techniques
• Background in anti-fraud, trust & safety, or abuse prevention systems
• Familiarity with distributed systems and infrastructure security
• Familiarity with abuse detection mechanisms and the ability to engineer novel bypasses
• Adaptability to understand and build engagements around emerging threats outside your direct area of expertise

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.

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.

Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage:

Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.