Autonomous Systems Security Engineer

Description

The company is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco that builds reliable, steerable AI systems. Its team is growing quickly and includes researchers, engineers, policy specialists and business leaders.

Claude runs on hardware in company data centers and in sites that partners build and operate. The security team covers those sites, the equipment that moves through them, and the people and vendors who touch it.

This role owns autonomous systems across that footprint as a single security domain. It covers automation that patrols, inspects and moves hardware, and detection of uncrewed aircraft and vehicles operating near sites. Interdiction is not part of the role.

You choose the approach, select and integrate platforms and sensors, write the requirements vendors build to, and run what you deliver, from the operating model that assigns missions to machines through to the playbook that turns a detection into an identified track and an evidenced handoff to whoever has airspace authority. The aim is security that largely runs itself, with coverage, fleet health and evidence checked continuously and tools and AI agents handling routine triage. Simple, standard controls that can be verified are preferred over elaborate ones. The team uses Claude across engineering, and you are expected to do the same.

You will work with the wider security team, including physical security systems and security monitoring platform engineers, with data center operations and legal, and directly with site operators, equipment vendors, and aviation and public safety authorities. Regular travel to data center sites, which are critical infrastructure, is part of the job.

Responsibilities

• Own the drones, ground robots and other autonomous platforms used for perimeter patrol, incident response and infrastructure inspection. This covers platform selection, operating model, operator qualification, maintenance, and the data path from machine to analyst.
• Engineer controls for automated vehicles and robots that move hardware or work inside secure areas: identity and access, network isolation, what they may record and where it goes, fail-secure behavior, their role in chain of custody, and acceptance testing before they enter a site.
• Design detection of uncrewed systems flying or operating near sites. This covers sensor selection and testing against live targets, per-site coverage, classification, false-alarm handling, and a playbook from first detection to handoff with evidence retained.
• Define and test heartbeats, loss-of-coverage and lost-link alarms, and fail-secure behavior, so that a silent sensor or machine shows up as a fault.
• Build integrations that send detections, tracks, telemetry and fleet health into the security monitoring platform, along with tools and agents that triage detections, check fleet health and assemble evidence. When a review keeps costing people time, build what retires it.
• Establish what may be sensed, flown, driven, recorded and retained at each site, including partner-operated sites, under the applicable aviation, spectrum, privacy and safety rules. Set up waivers, approvals and coordination with local authorities before they are needed.
• Write vendor requirements, evaluate vendors through live flights and runs, and hold them to what they ship.

Requirements

• Field experience with drones, ground robots, automated vehicles, or RF, radar or optical detection sensors. You have chosen, integrated or secured one that others relied on, and you have checked its real behavior against live targets or runs rather than relying on a datasheet.
• Experience integrating systems you did not build, such as vendor APIs, SDKs, appliances, and machine and sensor telemetry, into a platform meant to outlast any one of them.
• Comfortable reviewing code, designing data systems for security tooling, and automating work with AI coding agents, using Git and code review.
• Hands-on background in data centers, critical infrastructure or large hardware fleets.
• You have designed within a regulatory or safety constraint such as aviation, spectrum, privacy or machine safety, and can explain the decision it drove.
• You have owned a domain end to end: set its approach, carried it through with vendors, site operators, partners and authorities, and run it as a daily dependency.
• Bachelor's degree or an equivalent combination of education, training and experience, in a field relevant to the role, shown through coursework, training or professional experience. Required years of experience correlate with the internal job level.
• Preferred: Remote pilot certification such as FAA Part 107, and experience flying beyond visual line of sight under a waiver or exemption.
• Preferred: Experience with counter-drone (counter-UAS) detection, airspace surveillance or air traffic data systems.
• Preferred: Experience running a robot, drone or automated-vehicle fleet in an industrial, logistics or data center setting, including fleet management, mission planning and safety cases.
• Preferred: Experience securing embedded, operational technology or robotic systems, including device identity, network segmentation, update control and logging.
• Preferred: Experience with physical security operations at large sites, with law enforcement or aviation authorities, or at sites you did not fully control, such as cloud, colocation or GPU cloud operators.
• Preferred: You have built AI agents or automation that replaced recurring manual work.

Conditions

Annual salary range: $320,000 to $405,000 USD.

Based in San Francisco, with remote applicants in the US considered.

Hybrid policy: staff are expected in an office at least 25% of the time, though some roles require more.

Visa sponsorship is available, but not for every role and every candidate. If an offer is made, the company will make every reasonable effort to obtain a visa and retains an immigration lawyer to help.

Applicants who do not meet every qualification are encouraged to apply, and the company welcomes a range of perspectives.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits.
• Optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Flexible working hours.
• An office space designed for collaboration with colleagues.