Commercial Counsel, Hardware

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 335,000 - 385,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Benefits package

Optional equity donation matching

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Office space in SF

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a Commercial Counsel, Hardware to help product teams move fast, build safely, and get the legal calls right. You'll negotiate high-volume deals for hardware, components, software, and emerging technology procurement, and lead multifaceted technology, data, and partnership agreements.

The role partners with Procurement, Finance, and Legal, reviews licenses, tracks regulatory changes affecting hardware, and helps scale self-serve guidance and templates for routine purchases.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of legal experience in hardware or related technical field.
• In-house hardware company experience is a plus.
• Experience supporting product/engineering teams as counsel.

Responsibilities

• Negotiate and close a high volume of hardware and component agreements.
• Structure and negotiate technology, data, and partnership deals.
• Track regulatory changes affecting hardware products and explain implications.
• Identify trade controls and supply chain concerns in cross-border sourcing.
• Build self-serve guidance, templates, and AI-assisted review tools.

Skills

Contract negotiation

Hardware procurement

Cross-functional collaboration

Legal risk assessment

Regulatory compliance

Education

J.D. and bar admission (CA preferred)

Tools

AI tools for legal work

Outside counsel management

Job description

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

Hardware is becoming critical to how AI gets built, and the legal questions are as new as the technology. We're hiring a Commercial Counsel, Hardware to help Anthropic's product teams move fast, build safely, and get the legal calls right.

In this role, you'll negotiate a high volume of fast-moving deals for hardware, components, software, and emerging technology procurement needs. This role will also lead multifaceted technology, data, and partnership deals, many of them the first of their kind at Anthropic.

You'll be the legal and risk partner that technical and business leaders turn to when they need a fast, practical read on a deal or purchase. You'll clear low risk transactions quickly, spot the ones that deserve a closer look, and build scalable solutions as new complexities come up, all while working alongside Procurement and Finance and Legal colleagues in areas like privacy, IP, and trade. Along the way, you'll also support partnerships with major tech companies, universities, and media organizations, which gives you a view across much of the business.

Key responsibilities

Negotiate and close a high volume of agreements for hardware and components, including review of embedded firmware and companion software licenses

Structure and negotiate complex technology, data, and partnership agreements

Track legal and regulatory changes that affect hardware products and components, such as product safety rules and restrictions on foreign-made components, and explain what they mean for our plans

Identify trade, export control, sanctions, and supply chain concerns in cross-border sourcing, and work with our national security and compliance teams to resolve them

Build and maintain self-serve guidance, templates, and AI-assisted review tools so routine purchases don't wait on Legal

Manage outside counsel for specialist questions and overflow volume

Cover other technology or hardware transactions on the Legal team as needed

JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar (California preferred)

Hands-on experience buying hardware and firmware, components, and software in high volume, fast-paced environments

Deep experience leading complex deals, such as technology or data licensing, joint development, or supply partnerships

Working knowledge of international supply chains and how sourcing choices (and their associated risks) show up in contracts (lead times, single-source risk, warranties, country of origin, higher risk jurisdictions)

Working knowledge of trade and regulatory compliance for hardware, including export controls, sanctions, tariffs and customs

Clear, plain communication with scientists, engineers, and operators, so legal risk turns into a decision they can act on

A low-ego, "doer" attitude and real interest in taking on work outside your core practice area

Intense curiosity about AI and emerging hardware, and a commitment to responsible AI development

Preferred qualifications

At least 8 years of legal experience in hardware or a closely related technical space, with the judgment to run risk assessments and deals on your own from day one

In-house time at a hardware-intensive technology company (such as electronics, industrial automation, or complex devices) while it was scaling quickly

Experience supporting product or engineering teams as a dedicated counsel

Experience with facilities or on-site vendor services, including the insurance and safety questions

An engineering, product, or other technical background

Experience using AI tools to speed up your own legal work

Role-specific policy: For this role, we expect all staff to be able to work from our San Francisco office 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 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.

$335,000 - $385,000 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.

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.

Voluntary Self‑Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self‑identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Anthropic’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.