Platform Security Engineer, DRTM / Secure Launch

Location: 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

Anthropic is building the platform security foundation for the infrastructure that trains and serves frontier models. This role owns Dynamic Root of Trust for Measurement (DRTM) across that fleet: bringing it up on x86 and ARM, building the attestation and isolation properties it makes possible, and hardening the parts of the platform that DRTM alone does not cover.

The work sits at the lowest layers of the stack: firmware, bootloaders, kernel, and the silicon features underneath them. It is also unusually public. We expect the DRTM work done here to land upstream, and the person in this role will be a visible participant in the Linux and firmware communities rather than a consumer of them.

Security carries the same design weight as performance and scalability at datacenter scale. You will partner closely with our firmware security, hardware, and OS hardening engineers, and directly with vendor and OEM partners whose DRTM implementations we depend on.

Key responsibilities

DRTM adoption and integration:

• Own adoption and integration of DRTM hardware security features across Anthropic infrastructure, on both x86 and ARM platforms

• Implement attestation services and the additional security and privacy capabilities that DRTM presence enables

• Design and implement a bootloader-agnostic solution for initiating and relaunching DRTM sessions

• Investigate further hardening of existing DRTM solutions: PPAM to isolate SMM on x86, VMM features to isolate UEFI runtime services, ACPI handling and hardening in DRTM environments

Vendors and upstream:

• Interface with vendor and OEM partners on their DRTM solutions: refine requirements jointly and determine which changes are desirable and feasible

• Publish relevant DRTM work upstream and help carry Linux Secure Launch maintainership as tboot is retired

• Act as technical lead in architecture and design, and disseminate the work through technical papers, conference talks, and community engagement

• Assist other Anthropic teams with their own open source efforts and upstream interactions

Broader low-level platform work:

• Build and harden other platform security features, including confidential computing solutions such as TDX and SEV

• Support custom operating system artifacts, implement device drivers for custom hardware and features, and do firmware diagnosis and enhancement work

• Debug and diagnose kernel and system-level issues on production hardware

• Take on investigative work in new technical areas and old unsolved ones (for example, the distinct security problems in dTPMs and fTPMs)

Minimum qualifications

• Deep hands-on experience with measured boot and roots of trust: DRTM (Intel TXT, AMD SKINIT, ARM equivalents), SRTM, TPM 1.2/2.0, and the measurement chains built on them

• Strong C and assembly, with deep Linux kernel and early-boot fundamentals (bootloaders, UEFI, ACPI, SMM)

• A record of landing non-trivial work upstream in Linux, TianoCore, GRUB, or a comparable community

• Comfort at the hardware/firmware boundary and with the debugging that comes with it: JTAG, serial, platform-level bring-up, silicon errata

• Strong technical cross-functional leadership and direction setting, including with external vendors and OEMs

• Clear written communication: this role produces specifications, design docs, and public technical writing

• Working knowledge of NIST firmware security guidance, particularly SP 800-193 and 800-147/155

Preferred qualifications

• 8+ years in systems security, with at least 5 years focused on firmware, bootloader, and OS-level security

• Existing maintainership or subsystem ownership in Linux, or standing in the TCG, UEFI Forum, or OCP communities

• Confidential computing implementation experience: TDX, SEV-SNP, ARM CCA, and their attestation flows

• Hardware roots of trust and attestation beyond the TPM: Caliptra, OCP S.A.F.E., SPDM

• Memory-safe systems code in Rust

• Firmware vulnerability research, reverse engineering, or fuzzing

• Previous work with AI/ML infrastructure security

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.