Research Operations Lead, Biology

Warmada; Boston (MA); Hybrid; USD 210,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a Research Operations Lead to serve as the operational backbone of its Life Sciences team, ensuring end-to-end management of procurement, inventory, space, and safety, and scaling systems as the lab grows.

You will own budgets, vendor relationships, onboarding, and SOP development, collaborating with Finance and the central Workplace/IT teams to support cutting-edge biology within a frontier AI company.

Qualifications

• Have managed day-to-day operations of a life sciences lab — equipment, inventory, ordering, safety, space, and scheduling.
• Have hands-on procurement and vendor management experience: sourcing suppliers, negotiating quotes and service contracts, and coordinating field-service and maintenance technicians.
• Have tracked and managed an operating budget: purchase orders, invoices, spend-vs-plan, and capital requests.

Responsibilities

• Own day-to-day operations end to end: procurement, inventory, equipment scheduling and upkeep, consumables, shipping and receiving, and space organization.
• Develop and extend operating systems: procurement workflows, inventory tracking, equipment maintenance and calibration schedules, onboarding and training, SOPs.
• Manage facilities and space: coordinate buildouts, moves, equipment installs; interface with building management, contractors, and central Workplace and IT teams.
• Own the operating budget: track spend against plan, oversee capital equipment purchasing, partner with Finance on forecasting and reporting.
• Manage vendor and supplier relationships: including contract research organizations; source and qualify vendors, negotiate quotes and service contracts, schedule maintenance, hold suppliers to commitments.

Skills

Operations leadership

Procurement

Vendor management

Budget management

Project management

Team leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in Life Sciences

Tools

ELN systems

Inventory management

Capital equipment lifecycle management

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 team

Anthropic's Life Sciences team is building a world-class research group focused on making fundamental biological discoveries. The team combines cutting‑edge AI with hands‑on biological research, positioning Anthropic at the forefront of AI-accelerated scientific discovery.

About the role

We are hiring a Research Operations Lead to be the operational backbone of our team: the person who makes sure scientists can walk in every morning and get straight to science. You'll take on the operational systems we've started — procurement, inventory, safety, equipment, space — make them better, and scale them as the lab and its needs grow. We're hiring for trajectory as much as for what you've already done: the scope of this role will grow with the size of the team, and we want someone who's excited by that. This role is a rare opportunity to build the operational foundation of Anthropic's biology team and to grow with it. The systems you put in place will shape how a frontier AI company does experimental biology for years to come. If you're energized by high-ownership operational work in the service of ambitious science, we'd love to hear from you.

Key responsibilities

Own day-to-day operations end to end: ordering and inventory, equipment scheduling and upkeep, consumables, shipping and receiving, and general space organization

Build on and extend the operational systems a growing group needs: procurement workflows, inventory and sample tracking, equipment maintenance and calibration schedules, onboarding and training, SOPs

Manage facilities and space: coordinate buildouts, moves, and equipment installs; act as the primary interface to building management, contractors, and Anthropic's central Workplace and IT teams

Own the operating budget: track spend against plan, run the capital equipment purchasing process, and partner with Finance on forecasting and reporting

Manage vendor and supplier relationships: including contract research organizations: source and qualify vendors, negotiate quotes and service contracts, schedule preventive maintenance and field-service visits, and hold suppliers to their commitments

Minimum qualifications

Have managed the day-to-day operations of a life sciences lab — equipment, inventory, ordering, safety, space, and scheduling

Have hands‑on procurement and vendor management experience: sourcing suppliers, negotiating quotes and service contracts, and coordinating field-service and maintenance technicians

Have tracked and managed an operating budget: purchase orders, invoices, spend‑vs‑plan, and capital requests

Preferred qualifications

Are the person everyone in your group already comes to when something is broken, missing, late, or unclear — and you like being that person

Enjoy engaging with scientists on the science itself — you want to understand what's happening at the bench well enough to anticipate needs

Are results‑oriented and practical and pick up slack even when it goes outside your job description

Enjoy a role that stretches from the hands‑on to the strategic, and are comfortable when priorities shift quickly and feedback is direct

Lab operations or lab management experience in a biotech, pharma, diagnostics, or life‑sciences startup environment, including exposure to how those organizations build new functions and processes end to end

A degree in the life sciences and prior research experience at the bench

People‑management experience: hiring, onboarding, and supervising operations or facilities staff

Experience supporting a team through significant growth in headcount, footprint, or capability, including utilities, permitting, and equipment

Familiarity with liquid‑handing platforms, including their service, calibration, and consumable needs

Experience selecting and administering inventory management, sample tracking, equipment scheduling, or ELN systems

Capital equipment lifecycle management experience — evaluation, purchase, qualification (IQ/OQ/PQ), service contracts, and decommissioning

Experience with regulated shipping and receiving of biological materials, including import/export, permits, and material transfer agreements

Experience using AI tools for efficient team and process management (e.g., Claude Cowork)

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:
$210,000—$260,000 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.