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
At Anthropic, we believe artificial intelligence will profoundly impact the world. Our mission is to ensure that transformative AI systems benefit humanity. We are working to build safe and ethical AI systems that can help solve some of humanity's greatest challenges.
We are looking for a builder-minded Startup Partnerships Lead to drive the adoption of Anthropic's cutting-edge AI capabilities within the startup ecosystem. This is a 0-to-1 opportunity—you'll be designing and executing innovative programs that enable startups to access and build with Claude. You will partner directly with leading VCs (Lightspeed Ventures, Accel, a16z), accelerators (YC), and our top startup customers to scale our reach and impact. You'll define how Anthropic engages with the fastest-growing segment in technology and become a trusted AI advisor to founders and the VC ecosystem.
This role is for builders—someone founders see as a peer and trusted technical partner, not a traditional partnerships hire. You'll be hands-on with data, building your own dashboards, and shaping strategy through rigorous analysis.
Responsibilities
- Develop and execute Anthropic's startup GTM strategy, identifying and prioritizing top AI-native startups and building tiered engagement programs that balance personalization with scale
- Build strategic partnerships (with VCs, accelerators, startup ecosystem partners) that drive portfolio engagement—design and launch strategic programs with tier-1 VCs, own relationships end-to-end, negotiate partnership terms, and create exclusive benefits for portfolio companies
- Create compelling startup-focused offerings, pricing models, and growth initiatives in partnership with accelerators and entrepreneurial communities
- Build and maintain your own analytics infrastructure—design Hex dashboards, write SQL queries, and use data to drive program optimization and measure ROI
- Design and execute targeted events and programs—partner with founders and VCs to organize and project manage builder summits, founder salons, hackathons, demo days.
- Create enablement content, documentation, and trainings to help startups effectively build with Claude—technical content that earns respect from developers and founders
- Drive cross-functional coordination: Lead internal collaboration across Product, Engineering, Finance, Sales, and Corporate Development to ensure alignment on activation and penetration of accounts across startup ecosystem
- Program manage strategic execution: Drive accountability on key action items and milestones to ensure goals with key VCs and ecosystem partners stay on track
- Own executive stakeholder management: Build and maintain stakeholder maps across partner organizations; develop executive communication strategies and materials to strengthen senior relationships and ensure aligned messaging
- Scope and implement new partner processes: Stand up operational processes from 0 to 1 for new partners, including deal registration, reporting, and funding programs
- Gather product feedback and represent the needs of the startup community to inform Anthropic's product roadmap
- Partner closely with Sales, Solutions, Product, Events, and other cross-functional teams on integrated activation strategies and account prioritization
You May Be a Good Fit If You
- Have 7+ years of experience in product management, founder/operator roles, growth, or technical GTM roles—we're looking for builders, not traditional partnership profiles
- Are SQL proficient and comfortable building your own Hex dashboards—you'll be responsible for your own analytics and program measurement
- 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
Strong Candidates May Also Have
- 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 expected base compensation for this position is below. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation.
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 differentWe 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
Top Skills
What We Do
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. Our research interests span multiple areas including natural language, human feedback, scaling laws, reinforcement learning, code generation, and interpretability.
