Legal Program Manager, Contracts and Governance at Anthropic – San Francisco | Jobyssey

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 seeking an experienced Legal Program Manager to join our Commercial Legal team, focused on contracts and governance. This role is central to Anthropic’s compliance efforts on the commercial side: you will embed deeply in our sell-side contracting processes, partner across functions, and help build the controls, workflows, and governance infrastructure that revenue-generating activities require as the company matures.

You will sit at the intersection of Legal, Finance, Revenue Operations, Sales, Partnerships, Engineering, and Accounting — ensuring that commercial contracting practices meet our governance and compliance standards, with particular emphasis on revenue recognition workstreams. This is a high-visibility role where you will be expected to operate as a player-coach: managing and improving contracting processes yourself while building scalable systems, templates, and playbooks as the function grows.

Key responsibilities

Partner with Commercial Legal to continuously improve the end-to-end commercial contracting lifecycle for sell-side agreements (SaaS/API subscriptions, enterprise licenses, partnership and channel agreements, statements of work, and order forms), ensuring alignment with revenue recognition requirements under ASC 606
Partner with Finance and Accounting to ensure commercial contract terms and structures support accurate revenue recognition, including proper identification of performance obligations, variable consideration, contract modifications, and multi-element arrangements
Develop and maintain contract management workflows, templates, approval matrices, and playbooks that embed governance and compliance requirements directly into the contracting process
Build and operate contract governance controls tied to compliance requirements, including contract review procedures, delegation of authority frameworks, and exception-tracking mechanisms
Maintain disclosure-support processes for commercial contracts, including tracking of material agreements, contract-related risks, and commitments that feed SEC reporting and audit requirements
Partner with Revenue Operations, Sales, and Engineering to design and enforce contract execution standards — including signature authority, amendment protocols, and proper documentation practices — that support SOX compliance and internal controls over financial reporting
Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders (Sales, Partnerships, Finance, FP&A, Accounting, Engineering, and external auditors) to ensure commercial commitments are properly captured, classified, and reported
Deploy LLM and AI tooling to scale contracting throughput, surface governance exceptions, and reduce manual handling

Minimum qualifications

At least 8–10 years of experience in legal program management, legal operations, contracts management, or commercial legal support, preferably in a technology or SaaS environment
Deep, practical knowledge of sell-side commercial contracting processes, including SaaS, subscription, and enterprise licensing agreements
Strong ability to read, interpret, and analyze commercial contracts, with a thorough understanding of legal requirements, key contractual provisions, risk allocation, and compliance obligations (past experience negotiating and drafting contracts is a significant plus)
Working familiarity with revenue recognition principles (ASC 606) and how contract terms and deal structures impact revenue treatment
Experience building or significantly improving contracting workflows, templates, approval processes, or contract lifecycle management systems
Demonstrated ability to partner cross-functionally with Sales, Finance, Accounting, Engineering, and other business teams to align contracting practices with corporate requirements
Strong project management skills with the ability to manage multiple workstreams, drive accountability, and deliver results in a fast-paced, scaling environment
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate complex legal and financial concepts into clear, actionable guidance for non-legal stakeholders
Sound judgment and the ability to identify and escalate contract risks, governance gaps, and compliance issues proactively
Comfort using AI and LLM tools to streamline and scale routine contracting work

Preferred qualifications

Prior experience working in a public company environment, with firsthand knowledge of the governance, compliance, and reporting cadences that public company operations require
Experience at a high-growth technology company that has undergone (or is preparing for) a company transition
Deep cross-functional experience partnering with Accounting, Engineering, and other technical and operational teams — not just Sales and Finance — to drive contracting and governance initiatives
Familiarity with SOX compliance requirements, particularly internal controls over financial reporting as they relate to the revenue cycle and commercial contracting
Hands-on experience with Ironclad as a contract lifecycle management platform; experience with other CLM tools (Icertis, DocuSign CLM, Salesforce, or similar) also valued
Experience with vendor and supplier contracting processes, bringing a well-rounded understanding of both sides of the commercial contracting lifecycle
Background in building delegation of authority frameworks or contract governance programs from the ground up
Professional certifications such as PMP or CPCM (Certified Professional Contracts Manager)
Experience managing or administering equity-related commercial agreements, strategic partnerships, or complex multi-party commercial arrangements
Interest in AI policy, AI safety, and the legal and governance questions emerging at the frontier of the field

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:

$220,000—$285,000 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.

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 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.

Explore more jobs