Data Center Physical Security Lead Remote San Francisco, CA | Seat

Remote-Friendly (Travel-Required) | San Francisco, CA | Seattle, WA | New York City, NY;
Washington, DC

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.

You will own the physical security posture of all Anthropic‑spec data centers. Not managing guards and cameras—architecting defense‑in‑depth systems that scale from ground break through production, across multiple facilities, against sophisticated and well‑resourced adversaries.

Our version controlled and AI assisted library acts as one source of truth, driving consistent outputs and security that enables velocity rather than blocking it. Your job is to make it operational in steel, concrete, and sustained excellence.

• Physical Security Program Ownership – Define and execute the end‑to‑end physical security roadmap for all Anthropic data centers globally.
• Design and Engineering – Ensure integrated physical security systems (access control, video surveillance, intrusion detection, perimeter security) that work across different types of facilities. Balance security requirements against operational efficiency and construction timelines.
• Internal Partnership – Collaborate with Infrastructure, Operations, and Facilities teams to embed security into the data center lifecycle, from construction gates to steady‑state operations.
• Risk and Threat Modeling – Conduct risk assessments and threat modeling for greenfield and brownfield projects. Feed operational learnings back into the Controls framework.
• Compliance and Validation – Partner with Compliance and Legal to ensure physical security systems meet relevant standards, and customer requirements.
• Incident Response – Develop physical security incident response protocols with partners. When something happens, the team knows exactly what to do.
• Metrics and Accountability – Define KPIs that measure actual security posture, system effectiveness, vendor performance, incident metrics, coverage gaps.

• Have worked with construction teams to integrate security into the build process
• Can translate threat models into specific, measurable requirements
• Have managed security programs across multiple facilities and geographies simultaneously
• Know how to hold vendors accountable without destroying relationships
• Can communicate security requirements to engineers, executives, lawyers, and construction managers and get buy‑in from all of them
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and can make decisions with incomplete information
• Are energized by building from the ground up

• 10+ years designing, deploying, and managing physical security for high‑value compute infrastructure (data centers, critical infrastructure, sensitive facilities)
• Hold relevant certifications (PSP, CPP, CISSP, CISM)

Final date to receive applications: None, applications will be received on a rolling basis.

The annual compensation range for this role is 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. Our total compensation package for full‑time employees includes equity and benefits.

$365,000 - $435,000 USD

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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. 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…