Engineering Manager, Agent Security Partnerships

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 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 growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role 

Agent Security's mission is to safely increase how much of the world's work agents can do, starting inside Anthropic.

Claude now writes and ships code, runs experiments and acts on people's behalf, for hours at a time. How much more it can take on depends on how safely it can operate. If, in the worst case, an agent misbehaves, Anthropic and the public may bear the consequences. Our mandate is to mitigate this risk, and Anthropic’s mission depends on it.

The Partnerships team pairs security engineers with the teams at Anthropic that build Claude, build agents and rely on agents. Those teams are our partners. When a team wants its agents to do more, we threat model the plan with them and build the controls together. Most of this has no playbook, so we have often created new controls from first principles. The ones that work become part of our toolbox, spread to other teams, and in some cases ship in our products.

We're hiring an Engineering Manager to lead this team of security engineers. This is first and foremost a people leadership role. Few have secured agents at scale, especially at a frontier lab, so we don't expect you to have done it. We do expect you to have led security engineering teams, and we care most about how you lead people and reason about security.

This role operates at the frontier. Each model generation, and each new harness, brings new challenges. The number of teams building on agents keeps growing, and partner teams won't always agree with your calls. In return, you will have the chance to directly contribute to making transformative AI go well, which is the heart of our mission.

Key responsibilities 

• Hire, mentor and grow senior and staff security engineers, and raise the bar as the team scales
• Set the team's investment strategy, deciding which teams get embedded engineers, and for how long, as demand outgrows the team
• Support the team through high-stakes safety and security calls made under uncertainty and on tight timelines
• Balance long-term investment in shared controls against partner teams’ immediate asks
• Deliver large security migrations across all of Anthropic
• Work through difficult tradeoffs with partner teams in ways that build trust and understanding

Representative Projects 

In the past, the team has:

• Invented a new kind of classifier-based control for agents partnering with an internal team to develop and roll it out 
• Co-built a sandbox with a product team, choosing what to enforce first so that adoption stuck
• Defined the security standards for running agents across the company and partnered with many different teams on how to hit these standards

Minimum qualifications 

• Excellent people management skills. You've hired, developed and managed senior and staff engineers, grown engineers into staff or lead roles, and kept a team delivering through changing priorities.
• Deep security management experience. You've managed security engineering teams and answered to executives for risk and tradeoffs.
• Strong written and oral communication skills. You've explained hard tradeoffs to executives and to engineers in plain words.
• Resilience, emotional awareness, low ego and high empathy
• Experience leading large migrations and highly cross-functional work
• A willingness to dive into the details to tie-break complex trade-offs without any clear answer, and the ability to stand by these decisions

Preferred qualifications 

• Experience embedding security engineers with product, infrastructure or research teams, or running a security partnerships team
• Agent security or AI/ML security experience
• Familiarity with AI safety concepts and research
• Leading in hypergrowth

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:

$405,000—$485,000 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.

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.