VC Partnerships Lead

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 VC Partnerships Lead at Anthropic, you will drive transformative growth and strategic alignment by forging and managing high-impact startup partnerships. You will drive the adoption of Anthropic's cutting-edge AI capabilities within the startup ecosystem. In this role, you will design and execute innovative programs that enable startups to easily access and utilize Anthropic's advanced AI models. Your goal will be to scale our reach and impact by engaging with startups directly and through the accelerator ecosystem. 

This is an individual contributor role with broad ownership — you'll operate with high autonomy, partnering closely with sales, marketing, and product teams to build and run our startup partnerships motion.

Key responsibilities

• Develop and lead Anthropic's startup partnerships strategy, leveraging our AI technology and industry partnerships
• Build relationships with key VC firms, and entrepreneurial communities
• Create compelling startup-focused offerings, programs, and growth initiatives
• Cultivate strong relationships with current and new accelerator partnerships; build out relationship models, own touch points, and drive outcomes such that accelerator portfolio companies are choosing to build on Claude 
• Plan and execute startup-focused events, campaigns, and promotions to drive awareness and adoption
• Gather product feedback and represent the needs of the startup community to inform Anthropic's product roadmap
• Track and report on key metrics to measure the success and ROI of startup initiatives

Minimum qualifications

• Have 7+ years of experience in partnerships, founder/operator roles, growth, or technical GTM roles—we're looking for builders
• Have a deep understanding of the startup ecosystem and AI/ML technology landscape—can speak credibly about technical products to technical audiences
• Have built relationships with VCs, worked at a VC firm, or successfully partnered with accelerators to drive portfolio engagement
• Excel at 0-to-1 program building—comfortable building from scratch, wearing multiple hats, and scaling based on data
• Proven ability to develop and execute complex, cross-functional go-to-market programs
• Possess exceptional communication skills—outstanding writer who crafts narratives for founders, developers, and VCs
• Thrive in fast-paced environments with bias to action and comfort with ambiguity
• BA/BS degree or equivalent practical experience

Preferred qualifications

• Founded a company or led product at a high-growth startup
• Direct experience working for or with venture capital firms like Y Combinator, Lightspeed Ventures, Accel, a16z, Sequoia Capital
• Technical background—former developer, PM with hands-on coding experience, or deep familiarity with AI/ML development workflows
• Developer advocate or developer relations background with active presence in technical communities
• Familiarity with large language models and their applications in generative AI
• Existing relationships with venture capital firms, startup accelerators, and entrepreneurial communities

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.

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.