Head of Strategic Startups

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

As Head of Strategic Startups at Anthropic, you will own the strategy, organization, and commercial outcomes for Anthropic's relationships with the world's most important AI-native startups. This is the segment where the next generation of category-defining companies is being built on Claude, and where Anthropic's commercial, product, and partnership decisions compound fastest.

You will lead a team of Account Executives who own Anthropic's most strategic AI-native accounts, and be accountable for a revenue line spanning expansion, retention, and net-new strategic wins. Beyond running the business, you will define what "strategic" means for Anthropic in the startup ecosystem: which companies we bet on, how we structure partnerships with them, how we engage investors and accelerators, and how the signal from this segment shapes our product roadmap and go-to-market model.

You will be a member of the GTM leadership team and a visible voice for Anthropic in the startup and venture community, helping ensure that the companies defining the future of AI choose to build it safely, and with us.

Responsibilities:

• Set the multi-year strategy for Anthropic's Strategic Startups business, including segmentation, coverage model, partnership structures, and investment priorities, and secure executive alignment on it

• Build, lead, and scale a high-performing team of Account Executives, including hiring, coaching, and developing sellers and establishing a strong operating cadence across the team

• Own the segment's revenue plan and P&L-level outcomes, including forecasting, capacity planning, quota design, and resource allocation, with direct accountability to GTM and company leadership

• Personally lead Anthropic's relationships with a portfolio of the highest-leverage AI-native startups, engaging founders, CEOs, and CTOs on multi-year commercial, technical, and partnership agreements

• Design and negotiate novel commercial and partnership structures (credits programs, strategic pricing, co-development, joint go-to-market) that create durable, mutually beneficial relationships with breakout companies

• Serve as the executive voice of the startup segment inside Anthropic, bringing structured customer and market insight to Product, Engineering, Pricing, and Finance and influencing roadmap and packaging decisions accordingly

• Partner with Enterprise Sales, Solutions, Partnerships, and Customer Success leadership to define handoffs, shared accounts, and escalation paths as startups scale into enterprise customers

• Establish the systems of record for the segment: account planning, customer health, executive business reviews, deal governance, and the metrics leadership uses to run the business

• Represent Anthropic externally with founders, investors, and at industry events, articulating our approach to safe, frontier AI and why it matters for companies building on it

• Lean in to support building Anthropic's presence across the startup ecosystem.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 15+ years of experience in enterprise or technical software sales, with 7+ years leading sales teams

• Have been a founder or have worked previously as a Business Development leader securing large contracts.

• Have owned a significant revenue line with full accountability for plan, forecast, and results, and have a track record of consistently outperforming it

• Have built or materially scaled a sales or account management organization, including designing coverage models, compensation plans, and operating rhythms

• Bring deep, first-hand familiarity with the startup ecosystem, including relationships with founders, venture investors, and accelerators, and an instinct for identifying which early-stage companies will become the ones that matter

• Have sold or led sales of technical, consumption-based, or platform products (APIs, infrastructure, developer tools, ML/AI), and are credible in conversations with technical founders and CTOs

• Have structured and closed complex, non-standard commercial and partnership agreements at the executive level

• Are a strong cross-functional leader who has influenced product, pricing, and go-to-market decisions well beyond your own organization

• Are analytically rigorous and comfortable making decisions with imperfect data in a rapidly evolving market

• Are motivated by Anthropic's mission and care about how frontier AI is deployed, not just how fast it grows

Strong candidates may also:

• Have led a startups or emerging-companies segment at a cloud, infrastructure, or AI platform company through a period of hypergrowth

• Have founder, operator, or venture experience, and understand the pressures and decision-making of a high-growth startup from the inside

• Have built ecosystem programs (startup credits, accelerator partnerships, investor programs) that meaningfully drove adoption of a developer platform

• Have hired and developed leaders who went on to run their own organizations

• Have experience leading through a market where the product and competitive landscape shifts quarterly

Pay Range:

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: $550,000 - $750,000 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.