Strategic Sourcing Business Partner, R&D Operations

The posting, as Anthropic wrote it

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's R&D teams depend on a large and fast-growing ecosystem of outside service providers. The biggest and most complex piece of it is Human Data Operations (HDO): vendors that supply the human-generated data, evaluations, and expert feedback our research depends on. Alongside HDO is a growing set of other R&D services, including labs, outsourced and outsourced service providers, and other specialized service partners that our research and special-initiative teams rely on.

We are hiring a Strategic Sourcing Business Partner to own the commercial side of this portfolio. Today these vendors have business owners and Procurement Operations support, this role will drive real ownership of the commercial terms end to end including contracts redlines, deployment of contract templates, and the negotiation.. There is significant untapped value in this portfolio (in pricing, in contract terms, and in vendor performance), and this role exists to go get it.

The job has four parts: run the contracts (redlining, templates, and renewals). This person will lead the commercial negotiations, partnering with the business to positively influence decision-making and deal structure, and manage vendor performance once the deal is signed. Success means moving fluidly between the deal and the relationship: negotiating strong terms, then executing against them through QBRs, SLA enforcement, and escalations as our needs change.

We use Claude as part of our daily workflow and are looking for someone who wants to help define what an AI-native sourcing function looks like, including how AI changes deal-making and vendor management itself over the next few years.

How this role fits within Procurement

Procurement Ops Business Partners own the primary relationship with each business vertical and are the front door for intake and day-to-day requests. Strategic Sourcing partners closely with them and owns the commercial outcome: negotiation strategy, contract terms and redlines, contract compliance, ongoing vendor performance, and sustained value creation for the leaders of these verticals working closely day to day with Legal (legal positions, templates, terms), Finance & Strategy (budgets, forecasts, and strategy), and Security / TPRM (risk assessment, approvals, process).

Responsibilities

Contract management and templates

Own the commercial redline for HDO and R&D services agreements (MSAs, SOWs, order forms, amendments, and renewals), partnering with Legal on legal terms, so deals move quickly while maintaining negotiation posture

Build and maintain the template library for these categories (standard MSA
[…]
n 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 anthropic.com/careers 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.