Staff + Software Security Engineer, Secure Frameworks

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 485,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous vacation

Equity donation matching

Flexible working hours

Office space in San Francisco

Job summary

Anthropic, based in San Francisco, seeks an experienced Security Engineer to design, build, and run security foundations used across Anthropic's fleet. You will shape architecture, implement cryptographic frameworks, and lead zero-trust access initiatives while mentoring engineers and collaborating across product, research, and infrastructure teams.

You will focus on authentication/authorization systems, PKI/mTLS, and high-reliability services on Kubernetes, contributing to a culture of

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building security-relevant systems in production.
• Strong programming skills in Go, Rust or Python.
• Deep understanding of authentication and authorization systems: OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, JWTs, service-to-service auth, policy-based access control.
• Hands-on experience with PKI, X.509, mTLS and workload identity.
• Working knowledge of applied cryptography: primitives, key management, library failures.
• Experience shipping and operating high-reliability services on Kubernetes across cloud and on-prem environments, including on-call.
• Track record of bringing clarity and ownership to ambiguous technical problems across teams.
• Strong sense of developer experience and clear communication across all levels.
• Passion for AI safety and security engineering's role in trustworthy AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Build security foundations including cryptographic frameworks, mTLS, secure serialization, and authorization systems.
• Partner with product, research, infrastructure, and security teams to ensure frameworks integrate smoothly with lower-layer security controls.
• Scope, design and build security services end-to-end, production-ready and maintainable.
• Build and operate the zero-trust access gateway that fronts Anthropic's internal services.
• Design and roll out authorization frameworks to enforce least privilege across services.
• Own cryptographic frameworks and libraries.
• Mentor engineers, contribute to hiring, and grow security engineering culture.

Skills

Go

Rust

Python

OAuth 2.0/OIDC

JWTs

mTLS

PKI

Kubernetes

On-call

Developer experience

Communication

AI safety

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Kubernetes

Cryptographic libraries

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 team

Secure Frameworks is the team in Anthropic's Security Engineering org that builds shared security libraries and frameworks the rest of the company builds on. We collaborate closely with teams and leaders across Anthropic to own critical security foundations, including workload identity and authorization, cryptographic frameworks, and the centralized access proxy that secures traffic to internal applications.

Our mission is to make the secure thing easy and the easy thing secure by helping Anthropic engineers get secure behaviour by default and preventing entire classes of vulnerabilities through careful design. We own what we ship, help customers adopt better security practices and at times we work embedded directly in research, infrastructure or product teams.

About the role

You will design, build and run security foundations used across Anthropic's fleet, from threat model through production, on-call and adoption. Much of the work is greenfield: our infrastructure is growing quickly and the timelines are compressed, so you will help define the architecture rather than inherit it. Depending on your strengths you will focus on one or two of the areas below and contribute across the rest.

• Build critical security foundations including cryptographic frameworks, mTLS infrastructure, secure serialization, and authorization systems, designed to prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities
• Partner with product, research, infrastructure, and other security teams to ensure frameworks integrate smoothly with lower-layer security controls
• Scope, design and build security services and libraries end-to-end, maintain them in production, and drive through ambiguous technical problems with minimal oversight
• Build and operate the zero-trust access gateway that fronts Anthropic's internal services
• Design and roll out authorization frameworks so services enforce least privilege consistently instead of each inventing its own access controls
• Own cryptographic frameworks and libraries
• Mentor engineers, contribute to hiring, and grow security engineering culture across Anthropic

Minimum qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building security-relevant systems in production, including leading complex initiatives independently
• Strong programming skills in Go, Rust or Python
• Deep understanding of authentication and authorization systems: OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, JWTs, service-to-service auth, policy-based access control
• Hands-on experience with PKI, X.509, mTLS and workload identity
• Working knowledge of applied cryptography: choosing and composing primitives correctly, key management, and the ways libraries fail in practice
• Experience shipping and operating high-reliability services on Kubernetes across cloud and on-prem environments, including being on call for them
• A track record of bringing clarity and ownership to ambiguous technical problems and driving them to resolution across teams
• A strong sense of developer experience
• Clear communication across all levels of the organization
• Passion for AI safety and the role security engineering plays in building trustworthy AI systems

Preferred qualifications

• Built security frameworks or libraries adopted across an engineering organization, and done the work to drive that adoption
• Built or operated a zero-trust / BeyondCorp-style access gateway or identity-aware proxy
• Migrated a fleet to mTLS at scale, including certificate issuance and staged enforcement
• Maintained or contributed to open-source cryptographic libraries
• Designed authorization systems using policy languages or relationship-based models
• Familiarity with ML infrastructure (training, inference serving)

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: $32,000 — $485,000 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.

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.

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.