Autonomous Systems Security Engineer

Anthropic•San Francisco, CA

20h•Hybrid

About The Position

Anthropic is hiring an engineer to own autonomous systems as a security domain across its data center footprint, including sites, hardware, and the people and vendors who interact with them. The role covers drones, ground robots, and automated vehicles used for patrol, inspection, and hardware movement, as well as systems for detecting uncrewed aircraft or other activity near a site. Interdiction is not part of the role. The engineer will set the technical approach, select and integrate platforms and sensors, define vendor requirements, and operate deployed systems. This includes building an operating model in which operators assign missions and machines carry them out, and establishing detection-to-handoff processes that produce identified tracks and retained evidence. The goal is continuous verification of coverage, fleet health, and evidence, with tools and AI agents handling routine triage. The role favors simple, standard, verifiable controls and expects the engineer to use Claude in their engineering workflow. The engineer will work with DCSE colleagues, data center operations and legal teams, site operators, equipment vendors, and aviation and public safety authorities. The position is based in San Francisco; US remote applicants may be considered. Regular travel to data center sites, which are critical infrastructure, is required.

Requirements

Hands-on experience engineering autonomous or sensing systems in the field, such as drones, ground robots, automated vehicles, or RF, radar, or optical detection sensors; must have selected, integrated, or secured systems relied on by an operation and verified their performance against real targets or runs.
Experience integrating systems not built in-house, such as vendor APIs, SDKs, appliances, and machine or sensor telemetry, into a platform that can operate independently of any one system.
Ability to read and review code, design data systems behind security tooling, and build automation using Git and code review; the role commonly uses AI coding agents.
Hands-on experience doing this work for data centers, critical infrastructure, or a large hardware fleet.
Experience designing within regulatory or safety constraints, such as aviation, spectrum, privacy, or machine safety, and being able to explain the decisions those constraints drove.
Experience owning a domain end to end, from setting the approach through working with vendors, site operators, partners, and authorities, and operating the resulting system as a daily dependency.
Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.
A field of study relevant to the role, demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.

Nice To Haves

Remote pilot certification, such as FAA Part 107, and experience flying beyond visual line of sight under a waiver or exemption.
Experience with counter-drone detection, airspace surveillance, or air traffic data systems.
Experience operating a robot, drone, or automated-vehicle fleet in an industrial, logistics, or data center setting, including fleet management, mission planning, and safety cases.
Experience securing embedded, operational technology, or robotic systems, including device identity, network segmentation, update control, and logging.
Experience with physical security operations at large sites, law enforcement or aviation authorities, or sites not fully controlled by the employer, such as cloud, colocation, or GPU cloud operators.
Experience building AI agents or automation that replace recurring manual work.

Responsibilities

Own autonomous security and inspection platforms—including drones, ground robots, and other autonomous systems—for perimeter patrol, incident response, and infrastructure inspection; manage platform selection, operating models, operator qualification, maintenance, and data flows from machines to analysts.
Integrate detections, tracks, telemetry, and fleet health into the security monitoring platform, and build tools and AI agents to triage detections, check fleet health, and assemble evidence.
Engineer detection of uncrewed systems near sites, including sensor selection and evaluation against live targets, per-site coverage, classification, false-alarm handling, and a documented process for detection, identification, handoff, and evidence retention.
Secure automated vehicles, robots, and similar machines that move hardware or operate in secure areas, including identity and access, network isolation, recording and data handling, fail-secure behavior, chain of custody, and acceptance before site entry.
Establish site-specific rules and approvals for sensing, flying, driving, recording, and retaining data, including at partner-operated sites, and coordinate with local authorities under applicable aviation, spectrum, privacy, and safety requirements.
Define and test heartbeats, loss-of-coverage and lost-link alarms, and fail-secure behavior so that failed sensors or machines are identified as faults.
Write vendor requirements, evaluate systems using live flights and runs, and hold vendors accountable for delivered performance.