Head of Policy Design, Societal Harms

San Francisco, CA

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 Safeguards organization builds the policies, evaluations, and detection and enforcement systems that define and hold the limits on how Claude can be used. In this role, you'll lead our policy design team, managing the teams responsible for radicalization, child safety, user well-being, harmful manipulation, and election integrity, among other harm areas.

The team is responsible for understanding and defining the risks that come with engaging with Claude, how those risks materialize in the real world, and the mitigations needed to prevent them. As the manager, you'll work with your team to draw the boundaries between what is and is not allowed, then partner with research, product, and engineering to build the right interventions. Mitigating these harms takes the whole stack: the values and judgment trained into the model itself, the policies and detection systems we enforce on top of it, and the interventions we build into our products. More capable models, new product surfaces, and new user behaviors will keep testing these boundaries, so the team's policies have to keep pace.

You'll work closely with product to develop and iterate on the strategy and vision for how our safety layers fit together, and with your team and cross-functional partners to decide which mitigations make the most sense and how to implement them. You'll also coordinate policy decisions across the portfolio: ensuring they're made with the right stakeholders in the room, tracked over time, and applied consistently across harm areas and product surfaces.

This is a leadership role for someone who combines expertise in the harm areas themselves with fluency in how frontier models are actually developed and deployed, and who does their best work across team boundaries. You'll spend as much time developing the leads who own each harm area as you will on the policy questions themselves.

*Important context for this role: some of the work involves exposure to explicit content, including material of a sexual, violent, or psychologically disturbing nature.

Key responsibilities

• Lead, develop, and grow the managers and teams responsible for the consumer harms portfolio, including child safety, user well-being, harmful manipulation, and election integrity

• Coordinate policy decisions across the portfolio, and build the mechanisms that keep them tracked, consistent, and legible — so stakeholders know what was decided, why, and who owns what

• Set the strategy for how mitigations built on top of the model — policies, detection and enforcement systems, and product interventions — complement what is trained into the model itself, partnering closely with the alignment training team that owns Claude's character

• Prioritize across harm areas competing for the same resources, and make those tradeoffs and their rationale clear to leadership

• Serve as the escalation point for high-severity and ambiguous consumer harms decisions, including rapid response to emerging risks

• Partner with engineering, data science, product, legal, and research across the model development cycle so consumer harms considerations are represented from training through launch, on every surface where Claude is deployed

• Engage external experts, civil society organizations, and regulators, and translate that engagement into stronger policy and enforcement

Minimum qualifications

• Experience leading teams — including managing managers or senior specialists — in AI safety, product policy, or a related field

• Deep, applied familiarity with consumer harm areas such as child safety, mental health and well-being, manipulation, or election integrity, and good judgment about how these harms differ in mechanism, severity, and mitigation

• A track record of exceptional cross-team collaboration: building durable working relationships with teams you don't control, and getting to shared decisions where ownership is genuinely distributed

• Working understanding of how frontier models are developed and deployed — the training and fine-tuning cycle, evaluations, and launch processes — and how different model environments (consumer products, APIs, agentic tools) change both risk and the mitigations available

• Experience translating policy positions into mechanisms that can be enforced and measured, and communicating the reasoning to technical and non-technical audiences, including executives

• Sound judgment in ambiguous, high-consequence decisions, and comfort making a call and escalating appropriately on incomplete information

Preferred qualifications

• Subject-matter depth in one or more of the portfolio's harm areas, from academia, clinical practice, civil society, government, or trust & safety work

• Experience working directly with model training or research teams on model behavior, or shaping the character of a deployed AI system

• Experience with generative AI safety systems, including LLM-based classification, evaluation, or enforcement pipelines

• Experience engaging external stakeholders in these domains — child safety organizations, election authorities, mental health experts, or regulators

• Experience using agentic AI tools to scale a team's analysis and operations

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.