Application Security Engineer

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:

Anthropic is working on frontier AI research that has the potential to transform how humans and machines interact. As we rapidly advance foundational LLMs, application security is paramount. In this role, you will apply security patterns built for high-risk environments to safeguard model weights as we scale new capabilities. Working closely with software engineers, you will institute controls around access, infrastructure, and data to proactively minimize risks from bad actors. This is an opportunity to join a team of experts building AI for social good, while advancing the frontier of safe and ethical AI development.

Responsibilities:

• Lead “shift left” security efforts to build security into the software development lifecycle.
• Conduct secure design reviews and threat modeling. Identify and prioritize risks, attack surfaces, and vulnerabilities.
• Perform security code reviews of source code changes and advise developers on remediating vulnerabilities and following secure coding practices.
• Manage Anthropic's vulnerability management program. Triage and prioritize vulnerabilities from scans, audits, and bug bounty submissions. Track remediation and validate fixes.
• Oversee Anthropic's bug bounty program. Set scope, triage submissions, coordinate disclosure with engineering teams, and reward bounties. Cultivate relationships with the ethical hacker community.
• Research and recommend security tools and technologies to strengthen defenses against emerging threats targeting machine learning systems.
• Develop and document security policies, standards, and playbooks. Conduct security awareness training for engineers.
• Collaborate closely with product engineers and researchers to instill security best practices. Advocate for secure architecture, design, and development.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 5+ years of hands-on experience in application and infrastructure security, including securing cloud-based and containerized environments.
• Have empathy, collaboration skills, and a learning mindset to work cross-functionally with engineers of all levels to build security into the product life cycle.
• Can use creative and strategic thinking to reduce risk through secure design and simplicity, not just controls.
• Possess broad security knowledge to connect the dots across domains and identify holistic ways to lower the overall threat surface.
• Have the ability to distill complex security concepts into clear actions and drive consensus without direct authority.
• Have a proactive mindset to thread security throughout the product lifecycle through activities like threat modeling, secure code review, and education.
• Have strong grasp of offensive security to anticipate risks from an adversary's perspective, not just check compliance boxes.
• Have experience with modern application stacks, infrastructure, and security tools to implement pragmatic defenses.
• Are passionate for security fundamentals like least privilege, defense-in-depth, and eliminating complexity that could sub-linearly scale security through smart design.

Strong candidates may also:

• Have hands-on technical expertise securing complex cloud environments and microservices architectures leveraging technologies like Kubernetes, Docker, and AWS / GCP.
• Have experience with offensive security techniques like vulnerability testing, pen testing, and red team exercises. 
• Have familiarity with AI/ML security risks such as data poisoning, model extraction, adversarial examples, etc. and mitigations.
• Have experience building security tools, scripts, and automations.
• Have a solid foundational knowledge of security engineering principles and technologies. Keen to continue learning.
• Possess excellent communication skills, able to distill complex security topics for broad audiences.
• Have a passion for security and protecting users. Willingness to constructively challenge assumptions to drive security.

The expected salary range for this position is:

Annual Salary:$300,000—$320,000 USD

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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.