Strategic Sourcing Business Partner, R&D Operations

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 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.

• 7+ years of strategic sourcing, category management, vendor management, or commercial negotiation experience, primarily in services categories (data services, BPO or outsourced operations, lab or research services, managed services, staffing, or similar)
• Hands-on contract experience: you have personally redlined MSAs and SOWs, built templates and fallback positions, and know where the commercial value sits in a services contract (pricing exhibits, volume commitments, termination rights, SLAs and remedies, IP and data terms) and when to bring in Legal
• A track record of personally leading multi-million dollar services negotiations to strong outcomes, not just managing the process around them
• Judgment about where leverage lives and how hard to use it: you can look at a portfolio of many vendors and many concurrent deals and know which ones deserve a deep negotiation and which need a fast, standard path, and you have a reputation with past vendors and colleagues for being commercially tough and fair with partners that need to scale with us
• Strong analytical skills: rate and unit-cost analysis, TCO modeling, and pricing model design; you can find the real economics underneath a vendor proposal
• Services vendor management experience: SLAs, scorecards, QBRs, and escalations, and how to enforce them without damaging the relationship
• Comfort operating at pace: high deal volume, ambiguity, imperfect information, and a bias to execute rather than perfect
• Clear, direct communication with executives internally and across the table, including in difficult conversations and escalations
• Fluency with AI tools in your daily work and demonstrated experience in rebuilding your own workflows around them
• Experience sourcing human data, data labeling, annotation, or evaluation vendors, or comparable BPO and outsourced operations categories, and a point of view on where that market is heading
• Experience sourcing lab services, scientific equipment and consumables, robotics or hardware services, or other technical services for a research organization
• Experience at a hypergrowth company renegotiating or restructuring vendor pricing and contract structures under the growth curve
• Experience standing up sourcing coverage for a category from scratch (templates, playbooks, benchmarks), not just operating within an established program
• Experience designing vendor scorecards, SLA frameworks, and performance management programs
• Familiarity with the confidentiality, data-handling, and IP terms that matter for research and data vendors
• A point of view on how AI will change services vendor relationships and negotiations, backed by things you have actually tried

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:

$190,000—$230,000 USD

Logistics