Head of Security Risk
San Francisco, CA | New York City, NYFull-TimeLeadOther
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.
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.
