Principal Engineer, Privacy

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 working on frontier AI systems that handle sensitive information at enormous scale. How we protect that data, and how we build privacy into our systems rather than bolting it on afterward, is central to our mission of building AI that is safe and beneficial.

As one of our principal privacy engineers, you will be among Anthropic's most senior individual contributors on privacy. You will set technical strategy for how personal data is handled across products, research, and infrastructure, and execute the hardest parts of delivering it. You'll work at the intersection of privacy engineering, distributed systems, and AI safety, on problems without established answers. You will lead through influence, quality of thinking, and trust rather than formal authority.

Key responsibilities

• Define and drive technical strategy and architecture for major areas of privacy, spanning product surfaces, research and training data, internal tooling, and multiple clouds
• Identify and lead the highest-complexity, company-critical privacy initiatives, guiding engineers across many teams. Be comfortable building the most difficult pieces yourself
• Architect the primitives that make privacy the default and the safe path the fastest one: data discovery, classification, lineage, purpose-based access control, audit, retention, deletion, and export
• Turn regulatory, contractual, and consent obligations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, the EU AI Act) into enforced, continuously verified technical controls in partnership with Legal, Policy, and Compliance team
• Anticipate where AI capabilities, regulation, and customer expectations are heading, and position our systems ahead of them
• Mentor and develop staff and senior staff engineers, raise the bar for privacy design across engineering, and help hire senior privacy talent
• Represent Anthropic's privacy engineering to customers, regulators, standards bodies, and the research community

Minimum qualifications

• A track record of operating as a Principal engineer or equivalent: setting technical direction that multiple teams adopted, and delivering company-critical, multi-year initiatives
• Deep experience applying privacy engineering principles in production systems with a large user base, including privacy by design, data minimization, and purpose limitation
• Experience architecting data governance infrastructure (classification, lineage, access control, retention, or deletion) across distributed systems and cloud infrastructure at scale
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or similar languages; you are effective writing design docs, making architectural calls, and coding in critical paths
• Understanding of privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, and the ability to work as a peer with legal and policy experts to turn requirements into technical designs
• Written and verbal communication that builds alignment across engineering, research, legal, and product teams, up to senior leadership

Preferred qualifications

• Experience building privacy infrastructure or controls for machine learning or AI systems, including training data governance or AI agents
• Hands-on experience with privacy-enhancing technologies (e.g., differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, secure enclaves, secure multi-party computation)
• Experience establishing or re-architecting a privacy engineering practice under enterprise-customer or regulatory scrutiny
• Experience briefing executives, auditors, regulators, or enterprise customers on privacy risk, and defending your recommendations under challenge
• A history of growing engineers into Staff-level and more senior roles
• Contributions to open-source privacy tooling, privacy research, or industry standards

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:

$485,000—$625,000 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.

For roles performing work in California: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records or criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.

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.