Staff / Senior Data Center Security Engineer

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

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity donation matching

Flexible working hours

Generous vacation and parental leave

Job summary

Anthropic Limited, based in San Francisco, is seeking a Staff / Senior Data Center Security Engineer. This remote-friendly role requires travel to data centers and partner sites to design, implement, and verify security controls across hardware, facilities, and vendors.

You will build tooling and AI-assisted processes to automate evidence collection, access reviews, and asset custody tracking, while ensuring continuous compliance and rigorous risk management across external and internal sites.

Qualifications

• Experience securing data center hardware and sites.
• Ability to design controls and verify them.
• Experience with NIST SP 800-53 / ISO 27001 / SOC 2.
• Hands-on security work for data centers or critical infrastructure.
• Read and review code and design security data systems.

Responsibilities

• Own physical security domains at partner-operated and Anthropic-operated sites.
• Build internal tools, automation and AI agents for evidence collection and access reviews.
• Perform security reviews for new sites, leases and vendors.
• Write requirements and procedures as code for partners to test.
• Assess sites and suppliers against requirements on site and from evidence.
• Maintain continuous compliance evidence for audits.
• Respond to security events with operations teams and site operators.
• Read code and design the data systems behind security tooling.
• Apply control frameworks to real systems and produce evidence.

Skills

Security domain ownership

Automation tooling

Security audits

Code as requirements

Vendor security

Compliance evidence

Incident response

Security engineering

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Git

Code review

Automation tooling

AI agents

Evidence collection tools

Job description

Staff / Senior Data Center Security Engineer

Remote-Friendly (Travel Required) | San Francisco, CA

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

Claude is trained and served on hardware in data centers Anthropic operates and in sites partners build and run for us. DCSE secures that footprint: the sites, the hardware moving through them, and the people and vendors who touch it. You'll be the engineer for one or more security domains end to end: design the controls, build the systems that enforce and verify them, and set the technical standard the rest of the team and our partners build to.

The engineering is in the controls and the tooling that proves them. The goal is security that runs itself: requirements kept as code and checked automatically, evidence, chain of custody and access continuously verified, and tools and agents in place of manual reviews. We favor simple, standard controls and tools that can be verified over elaborate ones. We use Claude throughout our engineering workflow and expect you to as well.

This is a foundational role: you'll shape how our security engineering is built and scaled. The team's physical security systems engineers design and test the site security systems themselves; this role engineers the controls around them and across the domains beyond the facility itself: hardware custody, media, personnel and vendors. You'll work with the rest of DCSE, Anthropic's compute, data center operations, legal, compliance and procurement teams, and directly with data center operators, hardware vendors and logistics providers.

The role involves regular travel to data center sites, which are critical infrastructure, and may include on-call for security events at them.

Key responsibilities

• Security domains, end to end: own one or more of physical security at partner-operated and Anthropic-operated sites, hardware supply chain and chain of custody, media protection and sanitization, personnel security and site access, third-party and vendor security assessment, and maintenance and contingency controls
• Tools, automation and AI agents: build the internal tools, automation and agents the team runs on: evidence collection, access reviews, asset and custody tracking, partner intake. When a process keeps costing people time, you build the tool that retires it
• Security review for new sites, leases and vendors: find the gaps in the design, the contract and the operator's procedures, write the security terms and exhibits, and verify the fixes after signing
• Requirements and procedures as code: write requirements and procedures that a partner can build to and an assessor can test, kept as code in a version-controlled repository
• Site and supplier assessment: assess sites and suppliers against those requirements, on site and from evidence; document deviations and engineer the compensating control where a requirement can't be met as written
• Continuous compliance evidence: tie controls to the compliance frameworks we and our partners are assessed against, with evidence always current so an assessment pulls from it directly
• Security event response: respond to security events at sites (intrusion alarms, custody breaks, access violations) with operations teams and site operators; write up what happened and fix the control that allowed it
• Have engineered a security control domain end to end: designed the controls, built or integrated the systems that enforce them, and verified they work
• Read and review code, design the data systems behind security tooling, and build automation (often with AI coding agents) using Git and code review
• Have done security work hands-on for data centers, critical infrastructure or a large hardware fleet, in at least one of the domains under Key responsibilities
• Have applied a control framework such as NIST SP 800-53, ISO 27001 or SOC 2 to real systems and produced the evidence for it
• Write requirements a third party can build to and an assessor can test: each states what must be true, how it is verified and what evidence shows it

Preferred qualifications

• Experience across several of the domains above rather than one
• Experience at sites you did not fully control: cloud, colocation or GPU cloud operators
• Experience with federal assessment regimes based on NIST SP 800-53, including supply chain (NIST SP 800-161) and media sanitization (NIST SP 800-88) guidance; have produced evidence an assessor accepted
• Have built governance, risk and compliance (GRC) or evidence automation: automated control checks, asset or custody tracking, questionnaire and assessment pipelines, docs-as-code workflows
• Have run incident response at physical sites: alarms, investigations, after-action fixes
• Have worked in live data halls and on active construction sites, and can follow a method of procedure
• Experience redlining contract security language with legal and procurement counterparts
• Experience with international sites: per-country personnel screening and staffing restrictions, data residency, and export controls on hardware
• Have built AI agents or automation that replaced recurring manual security work

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.

$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 encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. 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.

Come work with us!

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.