Staff + Software Security Engineer, Labs

The posting, as Anthropic wrote it

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

Frontier AI is on track to be among the most consequential and most adversarially-targeted technology in the world. The capability curve is steep, the adversaries who want these systems are extremely well-resourced, and the security bar this will eventually require is well beyond where the industry operates today. Incremental hardening alone is not going to close that gap, so we need breakthroughs and a group of people to go find them.

Security Labs is that team. We run a portfolio of high-risk, high-expected-value security projects: the work that seems impractical until someone optimistic and stubborn enough actually tries it. Projects run on the order of weeks rather than quarters, and each one is either handed off to the Anthropic team that will own it in production or wound down with a writeup of what we learned. We expect a meaningful fraction of our bets not to land.

This team is intentionally scrappy and ambitious. We're intentionally iterating fast on high-risk research bets and we expect a meaningful fraction not to land. If a 30% project success rate sounds uncomfortable, or uncharted and chaotic territory isn’t both frightening and exciting, this probably isn't the right fit. There are other places in Anthropic Security doing important work with more structure, less risk, and more certain paths to positive outcomes.

The questions we're trying to answer include

• Can our core research workflows survive extreme isolation?
• Can we replace trust with cryptographic guarantees?
• Can the models themselves become our most effective security control?
• What would it actually take to defend against a tier-1 state adversary, and how much of that can we build now?

Who we're looking for. We're hiring generalists with rare depth. You're a strong software engineer as a baseline, and on top of that you've gone deep in at least one area most engineers don't get near: firmware or hardware security, applied cryptography, OS / kernel / hypervisor internals, formal methods, reverse engineering, or high-assurance and cross-domain systems. You've built things under your own direction, you're comfortable jumping layers when the problem demands it, and you'd rather take a swing at something that might not work than ship the safe incremental thing. You think the trajectory of AI matters a great deal, you're not comfortable with how the security side of it is going by default, and you'd rather be on the inside building the answer than watching from outside.

Current Project Areas

The portfolio changes as we learn. The kinds of bets currently in flight or queued:

• Standing up a prototype high-as

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n our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

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.