Head of Strategic Startups

EngineersOfAI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 500,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a Head of Strategic Startups in San Francisco to own the strategy, organization, and revenue outcomes for our AI-native startup relationships.

You will lead a team of Account Executives handling high-leverage accounts, shaping partnerships, pricing, and multi-year commercial agreements while aligning with GTM leadership.

Qualifications

• Have 15+ years of experience in enterprise or technical software sales.
• Have 7+ years leading sales teams.
• Have been a founder or worked as a Business Development leader securing large contracts.
• Have owned a significant revenue line with full accountability for plan, forecast, and results.
• Bring deep familiarity with the startup ecosystem, including relationships with founders and venture activity.

Responsibilities

• Set the multi-year strategy for Anthropic's Strategic Startups business, including segmentation, coverage model, partnership structures, and investment priorities, and secure executive alignment.
• Build, lead, and scale a high-performing team of Account Executives, including hiring, coaching, and developing sellers and establishing a strong operating cadence across the team.
• Own the segment's revenue plan and P&L-level outcomes, including forecasting, capacity planning, quota design, and resource allocation, with direct accountability to GTM and company leadership.
• Personally lead Anthropic's relationships with a portfolio of the highest-leverage AI-native startups, engaging founders, CEOs, and CTOs on multi-year commercial, technical, and partnership agreements.
• Design and negotiate novel commercial and partnership structures (credits programs, strategic pricing, co-development, joint go-to-market) that create durable, mutually beneficial relationships with breakout companies.
• Serve as the executive voice of the startup segment inside Anthropic, bringing structured customer and market insight to Product, Engineering, Pricing, and Finance and influencing roadmap and packaging decisions accordingly.
• Partner with Enterprise Sales, Solutions, Partnerships, and Customer Success leadership to define handoffs, shared accounts, and escalation paths as startups scale into enterprise customers.
• Establish the systems of record for the segment: account planning, customer health, executive business reviews, deal governance, and the metrics leadership uses to run the business.
• Represent Anthropic externally with founders, investors, and at industry events, articulating our approach to safe, frontier AI and why it matters for companies building on it.
• Lean in to support building Anthropic's presence across the startup ecosystem.

Job description

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 Head of Strategic Startups at Anthropic, you will own the strategy, organization, and commercial outcomes for Anthropic's relationships with the world's most important AI-native startups. This is the segment where the next generation of category-defining companies is being built on Claude, and where Anthropic's commercial, product, and partnership decisions compound fastest.

You will lead a team of Account Executives who own Anthropic's most strategic AI-native accounts, and be accountable for a revenue line spanning expansion, retention, and net-new strategic wins. Beyond running the business, you will define what "strategic" means for Anthropic in the startup ecosystem: which companies we bet on, how we structure partnerships with them, how we engage investors and accelerators, and how the signal from this segment shapes our product roadmap and go-to-market model.

You will be a member of the GTM leadership team and a visible voice for Anthropic in the startup and venture community, helping ensure that the companies defining the future of AI choose to build it safely, and with us.

Responsibilities:

• Set the multi-year strategy for Anthropic's Strategic Startups business, including segmentation, coverage model, partnership structures, and investment priorities, and secure executive alignment on it

• Build, lead, and scale a high-performing team of Account Executives, including hiring, coaching, and developing sellers and establishing a strong operating cadence across the team

• Own the segment's revenue plan and P&L-level outcomes, including forecasting, capacity planning, quota design, and resource allocation, with direct accountability to GTM and company leadership

• Personally lead Anthropic's relationships with a portfolio of the highest-leverage AI-native startups, engaging founders, CEOs, and CTOs on multi-year commercial, technical, and partnership agreements

• Design and negotiate novel commercial and partnership structures (credits programs, strategic pricing, co-development, joint go-to-market) that create durable, mutually beneficial relationships with breakout companies

• Serve as the executive voice of the startup segment inside Anthropic, bringing structured customer and market insight to Product, Engineering, Pricing, and Finance and influencing roadmap and packaging decisions accordingly

• Partner with Enterprise Sales, Solutions, Partnerships, and Customer Success leadership to define handoffs, shared accounts, and escalation paths as startups scale into enterprise customers

• Establish the systems of record for the segment: account planning, customer health, executive business reviews, deal governance, and the metrics leadership uses to run the business

• Represent Anthropic externally with founders, investors, and at industry events, articulating our approach to safe, frontier AI and why it matters for companies building on it

• Lean in to support building Anthropic's presence across the startup ecosystem.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 15+ years of experience in enterprise or technical software sales, with 7+ years leading sales teams

• Have been a founder or have worked previously as a Business Development leader securing large contracts.

• Have owned a significant revenue line with full accountability for plan, forecast, and results, and have a track record of consistently outperforming it

• Have built or materially scaled a sales or account management organization, including designing coverage models, compensation plans, and operating rhythms

• Bring deep, first-hand familiarity with the startup ecosystem, including relationships with founders, venture inv