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Staff Software Engineer, Container Infrastructure Security

San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY

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

At Anthropic, we're building frontier AI systems that require unprecedented levels of security and isolation. We're seeking a Staff Software Engineer specializing in container and VM security to help us design and implement robust sandboxing solutions that protect our AI infrastructure from untrusted workloads while maintaining performance and usability.

In this role, you'll be at the forefront of securing our serverless container infrastructure at scale. You'll develop comprehensive threat models for complex distributed systems, design pragmatic security measures across the stack, and build layers of defenses that can withstand the most sophisticated attacks. Your work will be critical in ensuring that our systems remain secure as we scale to support increasingly more powerful agentic workloads.

Responsibilities

  • Design comprehensive threat models for multi-tenant container infrastructure, identifying attack vectors across tenant isolation boundaries, API surfaces, and data flows
  • Develop and implement security policies and controls for sandboxing environments, ensuring strong isolation between different customer workloads
  • Build security architectures that address tenant-to-tenant attacks, privilege escalation, and data exfiltration risks in distributed systems
  • Create defense-in-depth strategies that combine network segmentation, identity and access management, and runtime security controls
  • Partner with infrastructure and product teams to implement secure-by-default patterns for deploying AI workloads in multi-tenant environments
  • Develop monitoring and detection capabilities to identify potential security breaches, anomalous behavior, or policy violations across tenant boundaries
  • Design and implement automated security testing frameworks to continuously validate isolation properties and security controls
  • Mentor other engineers on secure coding practices, threat modeling methodologies, and security architecture principles
  • Contribute to security incident response efforts
  • Collaborate with research and product teams to understand the unique security requirements of AI workloads and develop appropriate security strategies

You may be a good fit if you:

  • Have 8+ years of experience in security engineering, with deep expertise in securing multi-tenant infrastructure
  • Possess expert-level knowledge of threat modeling methodologies and have a proven track record of applying them to complex distributed systems
  • Have extensive experience securing serverless computing platforms or edge compute environments
  • Understand the security challenges specific to multi-tenant SaaS platforms, including tenant isolation, data segregation, and API security
  • Are proficient in multiple programming languages (e.g., Go, Rust, Python, TypeScript) with experience implementing security controls
  • Have hands-on experience with cloud-native security tools and services (AWS IAM, Security Groups, WAF, Cloud Security Posture Management)
  • Can design and articulate complex threat models, clearly communicating risks and mitigations to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
  • Have experience with zero-trust security architectures and their implementation in cloud environments
  • Thrive in ambiguous environments and can balance security requirements with business needs and developer experience
  • Communicate effectively about security risks, making complex technical concepts accessible to diverse audiences

Strong candidates may also have:

  • Experience working at a serverless platform provider or edge compute company
  • Deep knowledge of function-as-a-service (FaaS) security challenges and mitigation strategies
  • Experience with container security and orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, ECS, Cloud Run)
  • Understanding of AI/ML workload characteristics and their unique security requirements in multi-tenant settings
  • Contributions to open-source security projects or responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities in serverless platforms
  • Experience with Infrastructure as Code security (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) and policy-as-code frameworks (OPA, Sentinel)
  • Background in security research, formal verification, or security tooling development
  • Knowledge of compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP) and their application to multi-tenant architectures
  • Experience with runtime application security (RASP, IAST) or cloud workload protection platforms (CWPP)
  • Experience penetration testing code execution environments

Representative projects:

  • Designing a comprehensive threat model for our multi-tenant sandboxing platform, identifying and mitigating risks across network, data, and control planes
  • Implementing a policy framework that enforces tenant isolation while allowing secure resource sharing where appropriate
  • Building automated security testing that validates tenant isolation properties across API boundaries and data stores
  • Creating secure defaults and guardrails for serverless function deployments to prevent common security misconfigurations
  • Developing a runtime security monitoring system that detects anomalous cross-tenant access patterns or data exfiltration attempts
  • Architecting network isolation strategies using VPC, security groups, and service meshes to segment multi-tenant workloads

The expected base compensation for this position is below. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation.

Annual Salary:

$320,000 - $485,000 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. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process

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