Head of State and Local Government Sales

Austin, TX | Remote-Friendly, United States; Boston, MA; New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA; Washington, DC

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

As the Head of State and Local Government Sales at Anthropic, you'll lead and scale our state and local government sales organization to drive the adoption of safe, frontier AI across state agencies, counties, cities, and other local government entities throughout the United States. You'll leverage your deep understanding of state and local government operations and proven sales leadership expertise to build a high-performing team while establishing strategic relationships with key states, municipalities, and public sector partners. Working closely with GTM, product, and marketing teams, you'll define and execute our go-to-market strategy for the state and local government sector while maintaining the highest standards of security and compliance.

Key responsibilities

• Build, lead, and scale a state and local government sales team, including hiring top talent, setting clear performance expectations, and providing ongoing coaching and development

• Develop and execute comprehensive go-to-market strategies for state and local government, including territory design, market segmentation, competitive positioning, and revenue forecasting across a large and geographically distributed customer base

• Own overall state and local government revenue targets and ensure team performance against quotas, while providing visibility into pipeline health and deal progression

• Establish and cultivate relationships with governors' offices, state CIOs, agency executives, and city and county leadership, serving as Anthropic's senior point of contact for strategic engagement while empowering your team to own day-to-day customer relationships

• Win new business across state and local government by helping state agencies, counties, and cities integrate AI into their technology stacks and constituent-facing and back-office workflows to accelerate delivery and improve service outcomes

• Establish and refine sales processes, methodologies, and playbooks specific to state and local procurement, including cooperative purchasing agreements, statewide contracts, RFP/RFI processes, and state-specific compliance requirements

• Build and manage strategic relationships with cloud service providers, system integrators, and resellers to create scalable go-to-market motions across the state and local market

• Synthesize market feedback and customer insights to inform product roadmap and competitive strategy, working closely with product and marketing teams

• Partner with legal, compliance, and delivery teams to ensure successful contract execution and customer satisfaction

• Implement metrics, reporting, and performance management systems to drive team accountability and continuous improvement

• Represent Anthropic at industry events and with key stakeholders, establishing our brand as the trusted AI partner for state and local government

Minimum qualifications

• 10+ years of enterprise sales experience with 4+ years managing state and local government sales teams, with a proven track record of scaling revenue and building high-performing organizations

• Deep understanding of state and local government missions, budget and legislative cycles, modernization initiatives, and technology adoption patterns across multiple states and municipalities

• Demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain top sales talent while creating a culture of performance and accountability

• Experience developing and executing go-to-market strategies for emerging technologies in the state and local government space

• Extensive experience with state and local contracting vehicles, cooperative purchasing agreements, procurement mechanisms, and compliance requirements such as StateRAMP, CJIS, and state-specific data privacy standards

• Strong track record of consistently exceeding team revenue targets and building predictable, scalable sales motions across a high-volume, distributed territory

• Proven ability to build and manage strategic channel partnerships and ecosystem relationships, including cloud providers, system integrators, and resellers

• Excellent communication and relationship-building skills across all levels, from technical teams to state CIOs, agency executives, and elected and appointed officials

• Experience implementing sales methodologies, CRM systems, and performance management processes

• A passion for safe and ethical AI development, with the ability to articulate its importance in government contexts and build trust with state and local stakeholders

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

Annual Salary: $550,000 - $700,000 USD

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.