Strategic Sourcing Business Partner, R&D Operations

San Francisco, CA | Seattle, WA

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): roughly ~140 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 wetlabs, robotics labs, outsourced and BPO 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), lead the commercial negotiations, partnering with the business to positively influence decision-making, 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 Operations 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. You will also be 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 and SOW templates, pricing exhibits, SLA schedules, and a fallback playbook) so that most deals start on our paper rather than the vendor's

• Run the renewal calendar for the portfolio so that no agreement auto-renews or lapses without a deliberate commercial decision

• Keep contract data (rates, volume commitments, SLAs, key dates) current in our contract and intake systems so obligations are visible and enforceable

Negotiations and commercial strategy

• Lead pricing and commercial negotiations across the portfolio, from strategy and deal structure through terms, SLAs, and executive alignment; you will personally run the ones that matter most

• Build playbooks and Claude-powered tools for redlining, negotiation prep, benchmarking, and vendor reporting that raise the throughput and deal quality of the whole team

• Design pricing structures that fit how R&D actually consumes these services (per-unit, per-hour, capacity, tiered, and committed-volume models) and that align vendor incentives with quality and throughput

• Build and maintain a competitive bench for every mission-critical category via RFPs and competitive processes: qualified second sources, contracts structured so volume can move as needed, and flexible pricing constructs

• Track and report savings, cost avoidance, and improved terms for the portfolio

Vendor management and value creation

• Own the vendor management cadence for mission-critical vendors: QBRs, scorecards, SLA and quality reporting, and remedies when performance slips

• Manage escalations between R&D teams and vendors and drive them to resolution

• Identify consolidation, rationalization, and renegotiation opportunities as volumes shift, and bring executive-ready recommendations to R&D and Finance leadership

• Manage TPRM, security, and compliance approvals, audit rights, and data-handling terms in partnership with Security and Legal

Relationships & Partnership

• Partner with Procurement Ops BPs and the leaders in R&D and special-initiative teams to understand upcoming needs and growth, and get vendor capacity and terms in place ahead of them

• Partner with Finance & Strategy on vendor budgets, forecasts, and multi-year cost models for the portfolio

You may be a good fit if you have

• 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

Strong candidates may have

• 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

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 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.