Strategic Business Development Lead

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.

Were seeking a senior business development leader to own Anthropics BD partnership footprint with a small number of the worlds largest and most consequential technology companies. These are not single-threaded accounts. Each relationship spans many businesses at once consumer products devices and operating systems productivity and collaboration software cloud and developer platforms commerce and enterprise distribution. Your job is to see the whole board decide where Anthropic should lean in and where it shouldnt and turn that judgment into signed deals.

The center of gravity for this role is product and distribution partnerships: co-developing opportunities with partners and structuring the commercial technical and go-to-market terms that make those partnerships durable. Youll typically be running several deal streams inside the same partner in parallel at different stages with different counterparts and with terms that interact with one another and youll be the person responsible for keeping them coherent.

This is an individual contributor role for a seasoned dealmaker who is comfortable as the primary counterpart to senior executives at very large companies who brings strong judgment to ambiguous high-stakes situations and who can carry a complex multi-party negotiation from first conversation through signature and into execution.

• Manage a small number of large multi-faceted partner relationships end to end: set the strategy for each relationship decide which opportunities to pursue and in what order and stay accountable for the overall health and commercial output of the partnership across every surface it touches
• Lead product partnerships: identify and structure opportunities to embed Claude in partners consumer and enterprise products co-develop new products and features and define the product technical data and brand terms that come with them working closely with Anthropics product and engineering leaders
• Run multiple deal streams in parallel: manage several concurrent negotiations within the same partner product integrations distribution and go-to-market commercial and consumption agreements and infrastructure and sequence and connect them so terms in one stream reinforce rather than undercut the others
• Negotiate complex first-of-kind agreements: lead end-to-end negotiations involving novel commercial structures revenue and economics sharing product and roadmap commitments exclusivity and competitive provisions data terms and multi-year multi-component value exchanges
• Act as an executive counterpart: build and manage relationships with senior executives and their teams on the partner side serve as Anthropics primary voice into the partnership and prepare and steer Anthropics own executives through partner-level engagements
• Exercise judgment on behalf of Anthropic: weigh commercial upside against strategic competitive product and mission considerations; know when to say no; and make clear well-reasoned recommendations to Anthropic leadership on trade-offs that dont have a playbook
• Drive cross-functional execution: coordinate Product Engineering Sales Marketing Finance Legal and Policy across the life of a partnership from initial structuring through negotiation launch and ongoing governance ensuring what we sign is something Anthropic can deliver

• Direct experience owning a large multi-business partner relationship where you were responsible for the whole relationship rather than a single deal or product line
• Track record of structuring and closing product partnerships embedding technology into partner products co-developed products distribution through partner surfaces or similar in addition to conventional commercial agreements
• Experience personally leading complex multi-stakeholder negotiations with senior executives including deals with interlocking terms competitive sensitivities and multi-year commitments
• Demonstrated ability to manage several significant negotiations at the same time without losing the thread on any of them
• Experience coordinating cross-functional execution (e.g. Product Engineering Legal Finance) to bring a complex agreement from structuring through signature and delivery

• 10 years in strategic business development strategic partnerships or corporate development at technology companies with meaningful time spent managing relationships with very large technology partners
• Experience on either side of a partnership between a foundation model or AI platform provider and a large technology company
• Experience working inside one of the very large technology companies with a practical understanding of how decisions get made who holds budget and roadmap authority and how to navigate them
• Experience with partnerships that span both consumer and enterprise businesses or that combine product distribution and infrastructure components in a single relationship
• Understanding of foundation model capabilities and how they translate into partner products with enough technical fluency to work credibly with product and engineering leaders on both sides
• Background in corporate development strategy or a legal or finance discipline involving structuring and papering unusually complex agreements

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.

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.

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 policy for using AI in our application process.