Staff + Software Security Engineer (Labs)

About this 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?
• The portfolio changes as we learn. The kinds of bets currently in flight or queued:
• Standing up a prototype high-assurance research cluster: running real Anthropic training and research workloads under extreme isolation and physical security controls, and finding out exactly where productiv...