Staff / Senior Physical Security Systems Engineer

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

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking an experienced Data Center Security Engineer to design, specify, and verify physical security for its data center footprint in the United States. You will write performance requirements, review site designs, and work with vendors and internal teams to ensure robust protection.

The role involves regular travel to sites and participation in on-call rotations. You will own the security reference design package and help set site-specific engineering bases, while coordinating

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field and proven experience designing campus-scale physical security systems.
• Ability to read and produce construction documents (site plans, drawings, schedules) using AutoCAD, Revit, or Bluebeam.
• Write testable performance requirements and verification methods for security controls.
• Experience conducting commissioning and acceptance tests and rejecting non-conforming work.
• Derive requirements from a threat basis rather than a product catalog.
• Experience coordinating with vendors and design teams to deliver secure site designs.

Responsibilities

• Produce a vendor-ready design package for perimeter and site security.
• Define per-site engineering basis with risk-based requirements.
• Write acceptance criteria and test methods for all controls.
• Set standoff and hardening criteria for new designs.
• Run field verification and performance testing.
• Write operational and design requirements for security operations rooms.
• Own and manage site acceptance for delivered systems.

Skills

Security design

Field testing

Vendor coordination

Documentation writing

Threat-based requirements

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

AutoCAD

Revit

Bluebeam

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

Data Center Security Engineering (DCSE) secures Anthropic's data center footprint; this role covers how the sites are designed and built to be secure. Much of that footprint is designed and built with partners, so a site's security is decided early: in what Anthropic hands the people who build it, and in how rigorously the delivered systems are tested against it.

You’ll design and specify the physical security systems for a site: perimeter and vehicle barriers, intrusion detection, video, security lighting, and the site penetrations and utility entry points that bypass them. Design firms and integrators produce the site drawings and install; you specify, review, and verify. You’ll write the performance requirement and verification method behind each control, review every site design against them at each stage with redlines a design team can act on, test in the field that what was built performs as specified, and re-verify post-acceptance changes.

This is a foundational role. You’ll own Anthropic's physical security reference design package (typical details, reference drawings, schedules, and test procedures) in the form partners build from, and keep it current against each site's threat basis and the sites actually being built. You’ll set the technical position for a site and decide what applies where; where a requirement can't be met as written, you’ll engineer the compensating control and document the deviation. You’ll work with the rest of DCSE, with Anthropic's design, construction, and real estate counterparts, and directly with the vendors who build to the package. We use Claude throughout our engineering workflow and expect you to as well.

The same seat covers the team's security operations control rooms. You’ll set their design and operational requirements and accept delivered systems against them, working day to day alongside the team's platform engineers, who own the software and compute that run in them.

This role involves regular travel to data center sites. These are critical services, and this role participates in an on-call rotation for them.

Key responsibilities

• 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: performance specifications, typical details and reference drawings, and device and zone schedules, written so a design firm can build to them and a test can prove them
• 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 (detection coverage tests, photometric measurements, video quality checks)
• 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 to the team's segmentation and hardening baseline
• Own control room acceptance: factory and site acceptance criteria written before the build, then accept or reject delivered systems (video wall, consoles, cabling, fit-out) against them

Minimum qualifications

• Have designed or specified physical security systems (perimeter barriers, intrusion detection, video, security lighting) for campus-scale sites: multiple buildings, a secured perimeter, many detection zones
• Read and produce construction documents (site plans, civil and electrical drawings, device schedules, submittals) 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: you can say which adversary a control stops and where the next weakest point is
• 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

Preferred qualifications

• 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

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.

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

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.