Offensive Security Research Engineer

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 are looking for vulnerability researchers to help mitigate the risks that come with building AI systems. One of these risks is the potential for LLMs to enable adversaries to cause harm by automating the attacks that today are carried out by human cybercrime groups, but in the future may be easily carried out by humans misusing LLMs. We are hiring security specialists who are experienced at exploitation and remediation, and are interested in understanding how LLMs could cause harm in the future, so that we can better prepare for this future and mitigate these risks before they arise.

Responsibilities of an Offensive Security Research Engineer

• Triage any vulnerabilities discovered, coordinate and assist the external and open-source community in remediation
• Write scaffolds designed to automate typical traditional attack techniques to help clarify our defensive problem selection
• Research how adversaries might mis-use LLMs to identify and exploit vulnerabilities at scale in the future
• Develop promising defensive strategies that could mitigate the ability of adversaries to mis-use models in harmful ways
• Work with a small, senior team of engineers and researchers to enact a forward-looking security plan

You May Be a Good Fit If You Have

• 3+ years experience with pentesting, vulnerability research, or other offensive security experience
• Senior-level knowledge in at least one related topic area (reverse engineering, network security, exploitation, physical security)
• A history demonstrating desire to do the “dirty work” that results in high-quality outputs
• Software engineering experience
• Demonstrated success in bringing clarity and ownership to ambiguous technical problems
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional security initiatives and navigate complex organizational dynamics

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Published research papers on computer security, language modeling, or related topics; or given talks at Defcon, Blackhat, CCC, or related venues
• Familiarity with large language models and how they work; for example, you may have written agent scaffolds
• Reported CVEs, or been awarded for bug bounty vulnerabilities
• Contributed to open-source projects in LLM- or security-adjacent repositories

Compensation & Logistics

The annual compensation range for this role is $320,000—$405,000 USD. We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience. Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time, following a hybrid policy. Visa sponsorship is available.

How We're Different

At Anthropic, we believe in big science, working as a cohesive team on large-scale research to advance steerable, trustworthy AI. We view AI research as an empirical science, valuing impact and collaboration. Our research continues directions from GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation, benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a collaborative office space.

Key skills/competency

• Offensive Security
• Vulnerability Research
• Pentesting
• Exploitation
• Remediation
• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Cybersecurity
• Software Engineering
• Reverse Engineering
• Network Security