Security Engineer, RF and Technical Surveillance Countermeasures

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

Claude is trained and served on hardware in data centers Anthropic operates and in sites partners build and run for us. DCSE secures that footprint: the sites, the hardware moving through them, and the people and vendors who touch it. Part of that footprint is the radio spectrum around and inside each site: what transmits there, what listens there, and what the equipment itself gives off. You'll be the engineer who owns that domain end to end: on-site RF monitoring and detection, technical surveillance countermeasures (TSCM) and emanations security, from the threat basis through the systems that make the spectrum observable, to sign-off before a site opens.

The engineering is in the monitoring and in the tooling that proves the controls hold: the sensors, receivers and their placement, the site baselines, and the detection logic that turns a rogue transmitter or an unexpected emitter into an alert an analyst trusts. External specialist partners do the hands-on sweep and measurement work; you write the scope, direct them on site and decide whether their report stands. The goal is security that runs itself: coverage, sensor health and evidence verified continuously, with tools and AI agents doing the routine triage. We favor simple, standard controls and tools that can be verified over elaborate ones. We use Claude throughout our engineering workflow and expect you to as well.

You'll work with the rest of DCSE, including its physical security systems engineers and the engineers on its security monitoring platform, with Anthropic's data center operations, construction and legal teams, and directly with site operators and landlords. The role is based in San Francisco, with remote applicants in the US considered, and involves regular travel to data center sites, which are critical infrastructure.

Key responsibilities

• On-site RF monitoring and detection: design and develop the monitoring at each site: sensor, receiver and antenna selection and placement, the spectrum monitoring architecture, site RF baselines and what keeps them current, and detections that reach the team's security monitoring platform as alerts analysts keep trusting

• Tools, automation and AI agents: build the detection and classification tooling, the instruments and software for checks between sweeps, the findings and evidence records behind them, and the agents that triage alerts and watch sensor health. When a review keeps costing people time, you build the tool or agent that retires it

• Technical surveillance countermeasures: own TSCM end to end: sweep cadence by space sensitivity, event-driven triggers such as fit-out, room turnover or an incident, scope and acceptance criteria per sweep, and findings handled with evidence and closure an assessor accepts

• Emanations security: set the posture for sites: the assessment method, zoning and separation, and shielding, filtering and protected cabling where warranted, written into the team's design and build standards so a site can build to them and an assessor can verify them

• Wireless and device policy by zone: detect which radios are actually present where (cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, IoT, trunked radio) and produce the evidence that the policy holds on the floor

• Specialist partners: write the scope and the deliverable standard for sweep and assessment work, direct it on site, and decide in the acceptance review whether a report stands

• New sites and leases: carry RF and emanations requirements into design reviews, lease terms and pre-opening reviews, and sign off RF and emanations, including the pre-opening sweep and assessment, before a site opens

Minimum qualifications

• Have built at least one RF monitoring or detection system end to end, from receiver and antenna choice through the software that turns captures into alerts

• Understand RF at the engineering level: propagation, modulation, spectrum analysis and antenna behavior, with hands-on use of the instruments that measure them, such as spectrum analyzers and software-defined radios

• Have planned and conducted TSCM sweeps yourself and can explain, from having done the work, what a sweep can and cannot find and how an adversary would get past it

• Have done RF security, TSCM or emanations work hands-on for data centers, critical infrastructure or a large hardware fleet

• Read and review code, design the data systems behind detection and monitoring tooling, and build automation (often with AI coding agents) using Git and code review

• Understand compromising emanations and what zoning, shielding and filtering each buy and cost, and write requirements for them that a construction team or a landlord can build to and an assessor can test

• Direct a specialist vendor without deferring to them: write the scope, check the work, reject a weak report

Preferred qualifications

• Experience assessing compromising emanations and shielding or filtering tradeoffs in a live facility, and applying a formal emanations or counter-surveillance standard, government or commercial (TEMPEST, ICD 705 style construction requirements, or a corporate equivalent)

• Have built signal classification or spectrum analysis pipelines at scale, or tuned RF detections for a security operations workflow so operators kept trusting them

• Familiarity with airspace or drone RF detection, and with where it stops and on-site monitoring starts

• Experience at sites you did not fully control: colocation or multi-tenant facilities, where the RF environment and the walls are not yours alone

• Have built AI agents or automation that replaced recurring manual security work

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.

For roles performing work in California: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records or criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.

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!

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.