Commercial Counsel, Partnerships and Alliances
Anthropic
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 a Commercial Counsel for Partnerships and Alliances at Anthropic, you'll be the legal architect behind the strategic relationships that amplify our AI technology's reach and impact. We’ll count on you to be a trusted business partner who forges, structures, and negotiates transformative partnership arrangements including ISV integrations, SI alliances, reseller channels, and strategic referral networks. You'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI technology and complex commercial arrangements, building the legal foundation for partnerships that will shape how the world accesses and builds with Claude.
Responsibilities:
- Own end-to-end legal strategy and execution for Anthropic's partnership ecosystem, including ISV agreements, systems integrator relationships, channel partner programs, reseller arrangements, and strategic alliance structures
- Independently draft, negotiate, and close complex multi-party agreements involving technical integrations, support commitments, joint go-to-market strategies, and revenue considerations
- Serve as primary legal partner to our rapidly scaling Partnerships and Business Development teams, providing strategic counsel that balances legal risk management with aggressive growth objectives
- Design scalable partnership frameworks, templates, and playbooks that enable the team to evaluate and execute deals efficiently while maintaining appropriate risk controls
- Collaborate cross-functionally with Business Development, Partnerships, Finance, and GTM teams to structure creative deal solutions that achieve business objectives while managing complex risk profiles
You might be a good fit if you have:
- Have a JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar (California preferred)
- At least 8 years of relevant legal experience, with at least 3 years of substantial focus on technology partnerships, channel programs, and strategic alliances - you've been the lawyer in the room for ISV deals, SI partnerships, and reseller arrangements
- Demonstrated track record of independently leading complex, multi-stakeholder negotiations that resulted in successful partnership launches
- Business development instincts paired with legal precision - you understand partnership incentives and can spot opportunities to structure arrangements that work for all parties
- Exceptional ability to build trusted relationships with both internal business teams and external partner counsel, becoming the legal partner they actively want at the table
- Proven ability to design scalable processes and frameworks that enable high-velocity partnership execution without sacrificing quality
- Superior judgment in risk assessment and mitigation, with the confidence to say both "yes, here's how" and "no, here's why" when the situation demands
- Outstanding communication skills that translate complex legal and commercial concepts into clear guidance for technical and business audiences
- Genuine intellectual curiosity about AI technology and its applications, with commitment to supporting responsible AI deployment through well-structured partnerships
- Entrepreneurial mindset and comfort with ambiguity - you thrive in environments where you're building the plane while flying it
Strong candidates may have:
- Direct experience supporting partnerships organizations at high-growth technology companies, particularly those that scaled from startup to enterprise
- Background negotiating with and managing relationships with major systems integrators (e.g., Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, Big 4 consulting) or leading ISVs
- Experience designing and launching channel partner or reseller programs from the ground up
- Familiarity with partnership contract incentive alignment including deal registration, referral fees, revenue recognition implications, and partner incentive structures
- Experience with emerging technology partnerships (AI/ML, cloud infrastructure, developer tools) where legal frameworks are still evolving
Role-specific policy: For this role, we expect all staff to be able to work from our San Francisco or New York offices at least 3 days a week, though we encourage you to apply even if you might need some flexibility for an interim period of time.
The expected base compensation for this position is below. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation.
Logistics
Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.
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.
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