Head of Partnerships, Japan

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

Japan is one of the most sophisticated enterprise technology markets in the world, and one where partners, not vendors, typically own the customer relationship. The Head of Partnerships, Japan will build and lead the team that makes Anthropic's partner ecosystem the primary route to Japanese enterprise.

You will set the partner strategy for Japan, develop the team that executes it, and own the partner-sourced and partner-influenced pipeline, revenue and attach rate for the country. You will personally lead our most strategic partner relationships at the executive level while coaching your team to do the same across the GSI, regional SI, and reseller landscape.

This is a player-coach role for an experienced partner leader who has built and scaled partner businesses in Japan before, ideally for a US technology company entering or growing in the market. You will work day to day with the Japan sales leadership and the in-region Applied AI team, represent Japan within Anthropic's International Partnerships organisation, and carry the voice of Japanese partners and customers into our global product and go-to-market decisions.

What you'll do

Lead and build the team

• Hire, develop and retain a high-performing Japan partner team spanning GSI, regional SI and reseller coverage, sized and structured to the market opportunity

• Set clear goals, territories and partner portfolios for each team member, and hold the team accountable to pipeline, revenue and attach-rate outcomes

• Establish the team's operating cadence: one-on-ones, weekly pipeline reviews, deal inspection, partner QBRs and quarterly business planning

• Coach the team on executive engagement, joint business planning and co-selling in Japanese enterprise accounts, and model those behaviours personally

Set and own the Japan partner strategy

• Define which partner segments, partners and motions Anthropic prioritises in Japan, and in what sequence, based on revenue potential, customer reach and strategic fit

• Design the partner coverage model across our partner landscape (NTT DATA, Fujitsu, NEC, Hitachi, Accenture and others), and where we go deep vs. broad.

• Localise Anthropic's global partner program for Japan, including tiers, incentives, enablement paths and rules of engagement, and feed Japan requirements back into the global program design

• Own the annual and quarterly partner business plan for Japan and report on it to International Partnerships leadership

Lead our most strategic partnerships

• Own the executive relationships with Anthropic's most consequential partners in Japan, from joint business planning through to board-level sponsorship on both sides

• Negotiate and structure partnership agreements, including resale, co-development and revenue-sharing constructs, working with Legal, Finance and Deal Desk

• Lead the creation of joint solutions and industry offerings with partner practices in manufacturing, financial services, retail, telecommunications, life sciences and the public sector

Own partner pipeline, revenue and attach rate

• Carry the Japan partner-sourced and partner-influenced pipeline and revenue targets, and the partner attach-rate target, for the team

• Run a disciplined forecast with the team and with Japan sales leadership, ensuring partner deals are registered, progressed and closed with predictability

• Decide where to deploy partner investments (market development funds, enablement, co-marketing, headcount) for the highest return

• Build the reporting and systems hygiene that gives International Partnerships and Anthropic leadership a clear, trusted view of the Japan partner business

Represent Japan and drive cross-functional execution

• Act as the single point of accountability for the partner business in Japan with Japan sales leadership, the Applied AI organisation, Marketing, Legal and Product

• Ensure Japanese partner and customer requirements, including language, data residency, security and sovereignty needs, are understood and prioritised by global product and engineering teams

• Partner with the Japan sales leader to embed partners into account planning and co-selling for the country's priority accounts

• Resolve channel conflict between direct sales, SIs and resellers, and set the rules of engagement that keep the ecosystem healthy as it grows

Be the face of Anthropic's partner ecosystem in Japan

• Represent Anthropic at partner executive forums, industry conferences and analyst engagements related to the partner ecosystem

• Sponsor the development of Japanese customer success stories, delivered with partners, that resonate with Japanese enterprise buyers

• Build Anthropic's reputation as the partner-first AI company in Japan through the way your team shows up every day

What we're looking for

• 15 to 20+ years in enterprise technology, with a substantial portion leading partner, alliances or channel businesses in Japan

• 5+ years of people leadership over partner or alliance teams, with a track record of hiring, developing and retaining strong performers

• Direct experience building a partner business in Japan for a US or global technology company, ideally through a period of rapid growth or market entry (hyperscaler, enterprise SaaS, data or AI platform)

• Proven ownership of partner-sourced and partner-influenced revenue targets at a country or regional level, with the forecasting discipline to match

• Established executive relationships with Japan's major system integrators, consulting firms, and a reputation they would vouch for

• Experience negotiating complex partnership structures: resale agreements, joint solution development, and revenue-sharing or incentive models

• Demonstrated ability to operate as a player-coach, personally owning strategic relationships while building a team that scales beyond you

• Comfort shaping strategy in ambiguity and turning it into an operating plan, while working closely with global teams in other time zones

• Business-level fluency in Japanese and English, and the cultural fluency to move between Japanese enterprise norms and a fast-moving US company

• Based in Tokyo

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience with AI, data or cloud platform partnerships specifically, including partner-built solutions and marketplace motions

• Experience on the partner side, inside a Japanese SI or distributor, and an understanding of how those organisations make decisions

• Experience localising a global partner program for Japan and influencing its design

• Experience working alongside professional services or applied AI teams to deliver partner-led customer outcomes

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.