Level

Anthropic

Security Engineer, Offensive Security

Anthropic is hiring a Security Engineer, Offensive Security in San Francisco and New York, United States. It pays $300k-$320k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Anthropic.

Level's read on this job

  • On Level's scale, this cybersecurity role is Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
  • The listed pay starts 88% above the typical cybersecurity posting on Level.
  • Anthropic mentions visa sponsorship in this posting.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include Python, Go and Kubernetes.
  • Level lists 677 other open roles at Anthropic.

AI in this role

Conduct offensive security and red teaming on AI systems and cloud infrastructure at Anthropic.

pythongokubernetesgcpawsazure
ai-agentsai-safetyai-research

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 Team

The Security Engineering team's mission is to safeguard our AI systems and maintain the trust of our users and society at large. Whether we're developing critical security infrastructure, building secure development practices, or partnering with our research and product teams, we are committed to operating as a world-class security organization and keeping the safety and trust of our users at the forefront of everything we do.

What You’ll Do:

  • Conduct red and purple team engagements simulating advanced threat actors across our cloud infrastructure, endpoints and bare metal deployments.
  • Penetration test specific, high value deployments.
  • Contribute to AI-assisted security testing tooling and workflows.
  • Work cross functionally with other security and engineering teams, particularly on AI-specific attack scenarios.
  • Document and present findings to technical and executive audiences, translating attack narratives into actionable risk insights that inform security roadmaps.

Who You Are:

  • 5+ years of hands-on experience in red teaming and offensive security operations
  • Deep expertise in at least two of: macOS security, Linux Security, Cloud security (GCP/AWS/Azure), Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines
  • Track record of discovering novel attack vectors and chaining vulnerabilities creatively
  • Experience conducting adversarial simulations against well-defended environments
  • Strong engineering skills (Python, Go, or similar)
  • Ability to write clear findings that drive action, helping teams understand risk and prioritize fixes
  • Collaborative approach, working in close collaboration with the blue team

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

  • Prior work at organizations with state actor threat models
  • Interest in AI safety and how security engineering contributes to responsible AI developments
  • Background testing AI/ML systems or agentic workflows
  • Familiarity with detection engineering and SIEM/EDR platforms from the defensive side
  • Experience with data center security or hardware-based attacks

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be received on a rolling basis.

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:$300,000—$320,000 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!

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.

How we rate this

Security Engineer, Offensive Security at Anthropic rates 60 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI agentsAI SafetyAI ResearchPythonGoKubernetesGoogle CloudAWS

Also common in cybersecurity jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$300k
Typical cybersecurity job
$159k

This posting starts 88% above the typical cybersecurity job. See cybersecurity jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  2. How do you think about the risk of an AI system in this kind of role failing silently?
  3. Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
  4. What's a project where you used Python hands-on?
  5. Walk me through how you've used Go in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, AI Safety, AI Research, Python, and Go. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.

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