Head of Payroll & Equity

Anthropic; San Francisco, Seattle (CA, WA); Hybrid; USD 570,000 - 610,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking an experienced leader to oversee global equity administration and payroll operations, guiding teams to scale accurately and compliantly as we grow, including through listing readiness and public-company operations.

You will manage senior leaders across equity and payroll, partner with Legal, Tax, HR, and Accounting, and drive systems architecture and cross-border compliance to support Anthropic's mission and growth.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in equity compensation and/or payroll operations.
• Experience leading senior functional leaders.
• Experience operating equity and payroll at a public company standard.
• Familiarity with equity management platforms and Workday payroll.
• Experience building and scaling global operations across jurisdictions.

Responsibilities

• Lead equity administration and payroll teams, setting strategy and cadence.
• Own control environment to public-company standards.
• Oversee scaling to public-company standards across both functions.
• Drive systems strategy across compensation platforms and integrations.
• Act as executive escalation point with Legal, Tax, HR, and external providers.
• Oversee international payroll and cross-border equity compliance.
• Partner with Accounting on stock-based compensation and payroll accounting.
• Drive automation and continuous improvement of processes.
• Build headcount and resourcing plans.

Skills

Equity leadership

Payroll leadership

Cross-system architecture

Global operations

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Shareworks

E*TRADE

Workday Payroll

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

We are seeking an experienced leader to oversee Anthropic's global equity administration and payroll operations. In this role, you will lead the teams responsible for our equity compensation administration programs and global payroll operations, ensuring both functions scale accurately, compliantly, and efficiently as we grow — including through listing readiness and public-company operations. You will manage senior functional leaders across equity and payroll, and partner closely with Legal, Tax, HR, and the broader Accounting organization to support our mission to make AI beneficial for humanity.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Lead and develop the equity administration and payroll teams, setting strategy, priorities, and operating cadence across both functions
• Own the control environment for equity and payroll: design and document to public-company standards.
• Oversee scaling to public-company standards across both functions.
• Drive systems strategy across the compensation platforms, from equity to payroll, and surrounding integrations, ensuring a coherent architecture as we scale
• Serve as the primary escalation point and executive interface for equity and payroll matters with Legal, Tax, HR, and external providers
• Oversee international expansion of both functions, including new-country payroll setup, cross-border equity compliance, and mobility programs
• Partner with Accounting on stock-based compensation and payroll accounting, ensuring clean handoffs for close, reporting, and audit
• Drive automation and continuous improvement of manual processes across both teams through technology solutions
• Build headcount and resourcing plans that scale with the business

YOU MAY BE A GOOD FIT IF YOU

• Have 15+ years across equity compensation and/or payroll operations, with significant experience leading senior functional leaders
• Have operated equity and payroll functions to a public company standard.
• Have deep familiarity with equity management platforms (such as Shareworks or E*TRADE) and Workday payroll, with experience owning cross-system architecture
• Have built and scaled global operations across multiple jurisdictions
• Are a strong people leader who develops senior functional experts
• Thrive in ambiguous, fast-paced environments and default to building scalable processes over adding headcount

STRONG CANDIDATES MAY ALSO

• Hold CEP (Certified Equity Professional) or CPP (Certified Payroll Professional) certification
• Have experience with international mobility programs, worker secondments, and cross-border tax considerations
• Have led complex system implementations or migrations at scale

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.

$570,000 - $610,000 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 [e-mail] 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.

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 hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in aconfidential 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 measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis 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.