Head of Security Risk

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 Head of Security Risk, you will own the strategy, execution, and continuous improvement of our security risk management program. Reporting to the Head of Security Risk & Compliance, you’ll build out a team of 4–6 risk engineers and serve as the central point for risk intake, triage, quantification, and assessment across the organization. You’ll work directly with company leadership to build a risk governance structure that brings clarity and discipline to how Anthropic identifies, evaluates, escalates, and treats its most important security risks.

This role requires a genuine player-coach: someone who sets the vision and priorities for the risk function while personally diving into the most complex, novel, or high-stakes risk scenarios, particularly those at the frontier of AI risk where established frameworks don’t yet fully apply. You’ll oversee risk quantification processes including stress testing and scenario analysis, guide your team through structured risk assessments, and ensure that risk insights translate into actionable outcomes for engineering, product, and leadership audiences.

Responsibilities: 

• Own and steer Anthropic’s security risk management program end-to-end: risk intake, triage, assessment, quantification, treatment tracking, and reporting
• Manage and develop a small team of risk engineer, setting priorities, coaching on assessment methodology, and guiding the team through complex risk scenarios
• Design and operate the risk intake and triage process for ad hoc weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and risk submissions surfaced from across the company
• Partner with leadership to facilitate an enterprise forum for escalation, risk acceptance decisions, and strategic risk discussions
• Lead risk quantification efforts including stress testing, scenario modeling, and deep dives into novel risk areas, particularly AI-specific risks with limited precedent
• Oversee the execution of periodic and ad hoc security risk assessments across infrastructure, products, operations, and vendors
• Develop executive-level risk reporting and dashboards that give leadership clear visibility into top risks, trends, and program effectiveness
• Collaborate with various teams such as Engineering, Product, Compliance, Privacy, and Legal to ensure risk assessments reflect cross-functional perspectives and align with regulatory obligations (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, EU AI Act, FedRAMP)
• Lead the response to newly identified enterprise-level security risks, coordinating rapid assessment and escalation when needed

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 15+ years of experience in security or risk management disciplines, with at least 5-7 years in a people leadership role managing risk engineers or equivalent
• Have built, transformed, or significantly scaled a security risk management program at a high-growth technology company
• Have hands-on experience with quantitative risk analysis—including FAIR, scenario modeling, Monte Carlo simulation, or similar approaches
• Excel at engaging executives on risk decisions, translating complex technical risk scenarios into clear business-relevant recommendations
• Have established risk governance structures (risk councils, steering committees, escalation frameworks) that earned leadership trust
• Are a genuine player-coach who leads from the front on the hardest problems while developing your team’s capabilities
• Can write precise, compelling risk statements that convey technical depth while remaining accessible to diverse stakeholders

Strong candidates may:

• Bring deep expertise in risk assessment methodologies (NIST RMF, ISO 31000, FAIR, OCTAVE) and can adapt them to novel risk domains
• Have experience assessing AI-specific risks (model security, adversarial attacks, data pipeline integrity, prompt injection, training data provenance)
• Bring background in stress testing methodologies from financial services, critical infrastructure, or other high-stakes environments
• Have experience presenting to boards, executive risk committees, or senior leadership on enterprise risk posture
• Have experience with GRC platforms and risk management tooling (OneTrust, ServiceNow GRC, Archer, MetricStream, or similar)

Deadline to apply: None, applications will be received on a rolling basis.

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:

$345,000-$410,000 USD

Logistics

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. 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.com/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