Staff / Senior Physical Security Systems Engineer

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.

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

Pay and benefits

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

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.

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.

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!

Pay and benefits

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.