Life Sciences Counsel

Socket.dev; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 335,000 - 385,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is hiring its first dedicated Life Sciences Counsel to work closely with researchers on a broad range of biotech and AI-enabled life sciences initiatives. You will serve as the embedded legal partner across a fast-paced regulated environment, handling complex transactions and regulatory challenges.

The role requires a JD and U.S. bar admission, deep life sciences knowledge, and the ability to translate risk into practical guidance for scientists and business partners.

Qualifications

• JD and active bar membership in at least one US state (California or New York preferred).
• Deep understanding of life sciences industry: drug development, research organizations, and industry expectations.
• Experience negotiating and drafting IP allocation in multi-party research, including inventions and improvements.
• Excellent communication skills translating legal risk into practical guidance for scientists and business partners.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a strategic advisor to life science research teams on complex research, development, and commercial matters globally.
• Drive high deal volume with life science and biopharma counterparties across sophisticated agreement types.
• Identify, analyze, and manage life science regulatory risks with the broader Legal department.
• Design and implement scalable guidance and processes to support fast-growing life science efforts.
• Anticipate emerging legal developments affecting AI technologies and provide strategic guidance to leadership.

Skills

Life sciences domain knowledge

Regulatory affairs

Complex IP negotiation

Communication of legal risk

Education

J.D.

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

AI has the power to dramatically accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and the development of healthcare interventions. We're hiring Anthropic’s first dedicated Life Sciences Counsel to work side-by-side with our researchers as they work to advance biomedical progress.

You’ll serve as their trusted counsel on a wide range of efforts - from fast paced life sciences transactions with top research organizations to navigating the complexities of operating at frontier pace in a regulated ecosystem. This role carries unusual scope for a single lawyer: you will be the embedded legal partner to the team, while collaborating deeply across the broader legal department to pull in the wide range of subject matter expertise this strategic initiative will require for success.

Key responsibilities

• Serve as a key strategic advisor to our life science research teams on complex research, development, and commercial matters globally
• Drive high deal volume with life science and biopharma counterparties across a range of sophisticated agreement types
• Identify, analyze, and proactively manage life science regulatory risks in close coordination with the broader Legal department
• Design and implement scalable guidance and processes to support our fast-growing life science efforts
• Anticipate emerging legal developments affecting AI technologies in the life science and biopharma space and provide strategic guidance to leadership

Minimum qualifications

• JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar (California or New York preferred)
• Real fluency in how the life sciences industry works: how drugs get developed, how research organizations are structured, what pharmaceutical and biotech counterparties care about, and why
• Working knowledge of the regulatory environment life sciences tools may be deployed in — GxP, clinical and health data regulations, human-subjects research, FDA processes
• Deep experience with negotiating and drafting complex IP allocation issues in multi-party research arrangements, including ownership of inventions and improvements
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate legal risk into practical guidance for scientists, researchers, and business partners
• Experience scoping and managing outside counsel across specialties (FDA/regulatory, IP, privacy, export control) for both substantive depth and cost efficiency
• Exceptionally collaborative disposition - with the ability to find creative solutions that account for multiple priorities at once
• A low-ego, high-empathy orientation and a "doer" attitude — willing to roll up your sleeves and pitch in where needed
• Intense curiosity about AI and science, and a commitment to responsible AI development

Preferred qualifications

• 10+ years of relevant legal experience, including substantial experience in life sciences transactional work — contract research, strategic collaborations, and licensing and commercialization deals — with the ability to operate independently and hit the ground running
• Experience with AI/ML companies or products deployed into regulated scientific and clinical settings, particularly for drug discovery
• Familiarity with biosecurity, dual-use research, or export control considerations in the life sciences
• Experience leveraging AI to optimize their work, with a desire to work in a fast-paced, innovative environment
• Scientific or technical training

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

Annual Salary: $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.

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.