Lead, Data Center Security Delivery (Construction to Operations)

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