Lead, Data Center Security Delivery (Construction to Operations)

Company: Anthropic
Location: Remote-Friendly US (Travel Required) / Remote-Friendly (Travel Required) | San Francisco, CA

Compensation (Annual Salary:)

290,000 – 365,000 USD per year

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

Anthropic is building data center campuses at a pace where several are under construction at once, each moving through design, construction, commissioning, and turnover to an operating partner. Security scope on those projects (the physical protections, the systems that enforce them, and the operational readiness of the company that will run the site) has to be delivered as deliberately as the buildings themselves.

As Lead for Data Center Security Delivery, you will own security through that entire arc for every campus under construction: from groundbreaking, through construction-phase security, through commissioning and milestone acceptance, to a clean handover into full operation. You are the single point of accountability for "the site's security is actually ready", and you will verify that the operating partner has its people, processes, systems, and contractual security obligations genuinely in place before a site goes live.

This is a delivery role, not a watch-the-dashboard role. You'll absorb the day-to-day noise of active construction sites (schedule slips, design changes, vendor coordination, escalations) so the rest of DCSE can stay focused on steady-state operations and systems. And where DCSE's requirements or processes don't survive contact with a real construction schedule, you will have the authority, and the expectation, to rewrite them.

Role boundaries

This seat is distinct from DCSE's regional security operations leads and from the team's systems-engineering roles. The operations leads own steady-state regional programs (vendors, guard force, incident response) once a site is running; the systems roles build platforms and tooling. This role owns the delivery arc: every site's security scope from construction start through commissioning, acceptance, and handover, after which accountability transfers to operations.

Key responsibilities

• You will own the security delivery program across every Anthropic campus under construction: concurrently, from groundbreaking to handover.
• Construction-phase security delivery: temporary site security, contractor vetting and access, protection of installed equipment, and coordination with general contractors and site teams on every active build.
• Milestone and commissioning acceptance: define and maintain the security acceptance criteria at each construction milestone and commissioning gate; run or attend acceptance events (FAT/SAT, punch lists); issue or withhold the security sign-off.
• Operator readiness verification: build and run a structured, evidence-based readiness process proving the operating company is genuinely ready before handover: staffing and guard force in place, SOPs adopted, security systems commissioned and monitored, contractual security obligations demonstrably met.
• Clean handover to operations: own the turnover package (as-builts, test records, credentials, punch-list closure, residual-risk register) and the defined transition from construction-phase to operational security ownership.
• Requirements and process authority: rewrite DCSE's construction-security requirements, delivery processes, and acceptance frameworks where they fail in the field, and codify what works, so each build is cleaner than the last.
• Representation and escalation: represent security in design reviews, owner-architect-contractor (OAC) meetings, and change management; coordinate integrators, general contractors, and operator counterparts on security system installation, testing, and commissioning; surface schedule and readiness risks early, with options, to DCSE leadership and cross-functional partners.

Minimum qualifications

• Have personally delivered the physical security scope on new-build data center (or comparable critical-infrastructure) construction projects (design reviews through construction, commissioning, and turnover to operations) and can name the sites and your role on them.
• Have run milestone- or commissioning-acceptance processes: FAT/SAT, punch lists, turnover documentation, formal sign-off.
• Have held an operator, landlord, or vendor accountable to contractual security obligations, with evidence rather than assurances.
• Are comfortable being the person who says "not ready", and can do it in a way that produces a plan rather than a standoff.
• Can absorb the operational noise of multiple concurrent construction sites and still drive each one toward its handover date.
• Can author requirements, standards, and process documents that get adopted, and are willing to rewrite your own when they fail in the field.
• Work through influence with general contractors, integrators, operators, and internal partners; you shape decisions rather than block them.

Preferred qualifications

• CPP (Certified Protection Professional) or PSP (Physical Security Professional) certification, or commissioning credentials.
• Hyperscaler or major colocation new-build delivery experience.
• Experience on both sides of an operator/tenant relationship.
• Construction management or owner's-representative background.
• Experience in regulated or high-assurance environments.

Compensation

The annual compensation range for this role is listed 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.

Annual Salary:
$290,000 — $365,000 USD

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.

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 you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're 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 from @anthropic.com email addresses. In 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 you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit Anthropic careers directly for confirmed position openings.

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.