Vendor and Contract Manager, Safeguards

About Anthropic

Anthropics 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 the Vendor and Contract Manager on the Safeguards team you will own the end-to-end lifecycle of Anthropics safety-critical vendor partner and consultant relationships from identifying and selecting vendors through contract negotiation onboarding ongoing performance management and renewal. The vendors and partners youll manage span verification threat intelligence process outsourcing capability evaluation civil society consultation and research collaboration.

Youll build repeatable processes where theyre needed while staying nimble enough to handle novel partnership structures like research collaborations civil society consultations and model red-teaming engagements that dont fit neatly into standard procurement workflows. Youll work closely with legal procurement finance and engineering teams and youll be the person who knows where every Safeguards contract stands what were spending and where we should consider a change.

This is a role for someone whos comfortable operating across commercial legal and technical contexts in a fast-moving environment someone who can negotiate contract terms work with legal teams to redline contracts set up model access for a research partner and handle a vendor performance issue in one day.

*Important context for this role: In this position you may be exposed to and engage with explicit content spanning a range of topics including those of a sexual violent or psychologically disturbing nature.

Responsibilities:

Vendor Selection & Onboarding

• Understand the broad vendor landscape for Safeguards and drive vendor selection processes with expert input factoring in tradeoffs between capability price and internal resources across categories including verification threat intelligence process outsourcing and capability evaluation
• Conduct vendor due diligence and coordinate security and data governance reviews for vendors handling sensitive model access or content
• Forecast future partnership needs and proactively research vendors and partners that could meet emerging Safeguards requirements

Contract & Budget Management

• Manage contracts across the Safeguards vendor and partner portfolio working with legal and procurement teams on contract redlining negotiation and execution
• Work with legal teams and potential research partners to develop novel agreements for research collaboration civil society consultation and model red-teaming
• Handle invoicing payment and renewal processes with partners
• Own Safeguards vendor budget tracking and planning in partnership with finance teams maintaining a clear picture of current spend and forecasting future needs

Ongoing Vendor & Partner Management

• Manage vendor and researcher access to models and products during testing phases and trials
• Oversee and monitor vendor performance and usage flagging issues and resolving concerns and disputes as they arise
• Report on vendor performance spend and contract status to Safeguards leadership

You may be a good fit if you have:

• 5 years in vendor management procurement or contract operations ideally in risk fraud compliance or trust & safety contexts at a technology company
• Demonstrated experience reviewing and negotiating contracts including comfort with redlining and working alongside legal counsel
• Track record managing vendor budgets including forecasting tracking spend and making tradeoff recommendations
• Understanding of AI safety account abuse or platform integrity issues you know what verification vendors threat intelligence providers and content screening tools actually do
• Experience onboarding vendors and standing up new vendor relationships from scratch not just managing existing ones
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills particularly with legal procurement finance and engineering teams
• Comfort with ambiguity and fast-moving environments youve built or significantly improved vendor management processes not just inherited them

Nice to have:

• Experience in AI safety or AI-adjacent vendor ecosystems
• Familiarity with procurement tools such as Ironclad or Zip

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelors 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 arent 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 youre interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones were 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 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 youre ever unsure about a communication dont click any linksvisit for confirmed position openings.

How were 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. Were 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 aboutour policyfor using AI in our application process