Lead for Data Center Security Operations in North America

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

As Anthropic's Lead for Data Center Security Operations in North America, you will own the physical security program across our NA data center footprint — spanning owned sites and colocation partners. You will partner closely with data center build and operations teams from the earliest design conversations through commissioning and into steady-state operations, shaping the security posture that protects some of the most consequential AI compute in the industry.

This role is hands-on and strategic at the same time. You'll be on-site when it matters, author the policies and standards that govern the region, run the vendor and guard-force relationships that keep our sites secure day-to-day, and lead incident response when something happens. You'll also be one of the primary regional voices shaping how security integrates with infrastructure, compute, real estate, and legal partners as Anthropic scales.

You will join a growing Data Center Security Engineering function that is still in build mode. The work is ambiguous, fast-moving, and changes as strategy changes. We need someone who can set direction without waiting for mature playbooks, and who treats security as an enabler of business outcomes.

Responsibilities

You will own a region of North America data center security operations program across owned and colocation sites.

• You'll partner with data center build and engineering teams on new-site design and activation, ensuring security scope is defined, delivered, and turned over to operations cleanly.
• You'll lead the regional vendor portfolio such as integrators, guard-force providers, and general contractors with meaningful budget and SLA ownership.
• You'll author and maintain the policies, standards, and SOPs that govern physical security in the region, keeping them aligned with company-wide frameworks.
• You'll lead physical security incident response and investigations, and you'll represent the region in cross-functional forums that shape infrastructure, compute, and real estate decisions.

Qualifications

You may be a good fit if you

• Have extensive experience operating physical security at hyperscale or at a major colocation operator across multiple sites, with direct ownership of the operating model, vendors, and on-call.
• Have personally led the security scope on new-build data center projects from design through construction, commissioning, and turnover to operations.
• Have worked across both owned data centers and colocation space, and understand how the operator/tenant dynamic changes your controls, vendors, and incident response.
• Can author physical security policies, standards, and SOPs that get adopted and followed.
• Drive security outcomes through cross-functional partners (infrastructure, construction, real estate, compliance, legal) by shaping decisions, not by blocking them.
• Manage a real vendor portfolio, integrators, guard force, general contractors with SLAs, budget, and performance accountability.
• Adapt well when design and strategy shift mid-stream and can re-scope a program without losing momentum.
• Calibrate security to business reality can explain when you chose not to apply a control and why.

Strong candidates may have

• CPP (Certified Protection Professional) or PSP (Physical Security Professional) certification.
• Experience standing up a data center security function from 0→1 (not just running an established one).
• Background in a regulated environment, critical infrastructure, financial services, federal/defense, or similar.
• Direct experience leading an external audit or customer security review of data center physical controls.

Strong candidates need not have

• A specific university, credential, or prior employer. We care about what you've built and operated, not where.
• Prior people-management experience, this role is an IC lead today. If you've led matrixed or virtual teams, that's enough.
• Experience in AI or machine learning infrastructure specifically we'll teach you how our workloads shape the security posture.

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s 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 aren't 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.

How We're 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. We're 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 about our policy for using AI in our application process