Staff / Senior Physical Security Systems Engineer

Location: Remote-friendly with regular travel to data center sites; staff are expected to work from one of Anthropic's offices at least 25% of the time. San Francisco, CA.

Annual salary: $320,000–$405,000 USD

Company

Anthropic develops reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems intended to be safe and beneficial for users and society.

What you will do

• Produce vendor-ready designs for perimeter barriers, hostile vehicle mitigation, intrusion detection, video coverage, security lighting, and penetration protection.
• Define site-specific engineering requirements from threat and risk assessments, including compensating controls and documented deviations.
• Write performance requirements, acceptance criteria, verification methods, and evidence requirements for security systems.
• Review construction documents and run commissioning, field verification, and acceptance testing for detection, video, lighting, and perimeter systems.
• Define design and operational requirements for security operations control rooms, including consoles, video walls, networks, power, backup, and resilient communications.
• Own control room factory and site acceptance, working with design, construction, real estate, platform engineering, and vendors.

Requirements

• Experience designing or specifying physical security systems for campus-scale sites with secured perimeters and multiple detection zones.
• Ability to read and produce construction documents, site plans, civil and electrical drawings, device schedules, and submittals using tools such as AutoCAD, Revit, or Bluebeam.
• Experience writing testable performance requirements and running commissioning or acceptance tests, including rejecting work that does not meet specifications.
• Ability to derive controls from a threat basis, identify the next weakest point, and engineer compensating controls.
• Experience owning an engineering domain, selecting site-specific approaches, working directly with vendors, and being accountable for results.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent education, training, and experience in a relevant field.

Nice to have

• Experience carrying physical security designs from construction documents through construction and acceptance testing.
• Experience with colocation or partner-delivered facilities and standards for standoff, hostile vehicle mitigation, and intrusion detection zoning.
• Photometric and video quality measurement experience.
• Control room, AV, network design, or resilient communications experience.
• Experience using AI-assisted tooling for drafting and review.

Culture & Benefits

• Regular travel to data center sites and participation in an on-call rotation are required.
• Flexible working hours and a collaborative office environment.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Competitive compensation and optional equity donation matching.
• Visa sponsorship is available, with reasonable efforts and immigration lawyer support for candidates receiving an offer.