Offensive Security Research Engineer, Safeguards

About Anthropic

Anthropics 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:

• 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 mise-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

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelors 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 arent 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 youre interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones were 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 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 youre ever unsure about a communication dont click any linksvisit for confirmed position openings.

How were 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. Were 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 aboutour policyfor using AI in our application process