Strategic Business Development Lead
Anthropic · San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY | Seattle, WA ·
- Seniority
- Lead
- Category
- Sales
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
We're seeking a business development lead to own Anthropic's BD partnership footprint with a small number of the world's 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 shouldn't, 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. You'll 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 you'll 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.
Key responsibilities
- 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 Anthropic's 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 Anthropic's primary voice into the partnership, and prepare and steer Anthropic's 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 don't 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
Minimum qualifications
- 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
Preferred qualifications
- 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
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.
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.