Platform Security Engineering, Operating Systems

San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA

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

We're looking for an Operating Systems Security Engineer to harden and secure the OS layer of our infrastructure. You'll be responsible for designing and implementing OS-level security controls, from kernel hardening to runtime protection, ensuring our systems can withstand sophisticated attacks while maintaining the performance required for AI model training.

This is a hands-on role where you'll work with cutting-edge hardware and implement novel security solutions for environments that don't exist anywhere else in the world. You'll need to balance extreme security requirements with the operational needs of researchers training models at unprecedented scale.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement hardened OS configurations for AI workloads across diverse hardware platforms

• Minimize attack surfaces by removing as many unnecessary components as possible from kernelspace and userspace

• Develop kernel security policies using SELinux, AppArmor, and custom Linux Security Modules and runtime enforcement mechanisms

• Implement and maintain full-disk encryption solutions for diverse storage systems

• Build security infrastructure for AI systems, research environments, and production services

• Create OS-level attestation and integrity monitoring systems

• Apply security patches, develop patches for custom kernel modules, and kernel hardening configurations

• Design secure boot processes and trusted execution environments

• Work with container teams to ensure proper workload isolation at the kernel level

• Design privilege separation and mandatory access control policies

• Implement secure update mechanisms for OS components

• Build tooling for security configuration management and compliance verification

• Serve as a subject matter expert for OS security questions and designs

Minimum qualifications

• Deep knowledge of Linux internals, including kernel subsystems and security frameworks (SELinux, AppArmor, seccomp, etc.)

• Experience with kernel hardening techniques and exploit mitigation

• Strong programming skills in C and systems programming languages

• Experience with eBPF for security monitoring and enforcement

• Understanding of virtualization and containerization security

• Track record of identifying and fixing OS-level security vulnerabilities

• Experience with security-focused Linux distributions

Preferred qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in operating systems security or kernel development

• Kernel development experience or contributions to Linux kernel

• Experience with real-time or embedded operating systems

• Knowledge of hardware security features and their OS integration

• Experience with secure boot technologies

• Experience with confidential computing and memory encryption technologies (SEV, TDX, SGX)

• Background in vulnerability research, exploit development, or fuzzing

• Experience with formal methods for OS verification

• Knowledge of hardware security features and their OS integration (TPM, HSM, secure enclaves)

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!

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.