Strategic Deals Lead, Compute Infrastructure

Anthropic; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 265,000 - 325,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic in San Francisco is seeking a Strategic Deals Lead to shape compute infrastructure strategy, negotiate multi-billion deals, and build strategic partnerships with leading tech providers. You will own the full deal lifecycle, coordinate with engineering, finance, legal, and executive leadership, and translate complex technical requirements into scalable investment strategies.

This role requires deep experience in AI infrastructure, capital markets, and high-value transactions, with the

Qualifications

• Experience in AI infrastructure including on-premise capacity building, cloud, semiconductors, data centers, backbone, networking, or adjacent technology ecosystems.
• Background in strategic partnerships, hyperscaler deal structuring, network investments, investment banking, private equity, or infrastructure investments.
• Deep understanding of the compute ecosystem, infrastructure economics, and trends that drive the AI Infrastructure space.
• Demonstrated track record of structuring, negotiating, and closing complex, high-value technology transactions or strategic partnerships as a principal and lead negotiator.
• Working understanding of capital markets, project financing, and structuring financial transactions alongside commercial terms.
• Experience evaluating emerging technologies, developing long-term infrastructure or ecosystem strategies, and converting those strategies into signed agreements.
• Ability to work effectively with technical teams and translate complex engineering concepts into deal structures and strategic business recommendations.
• Experience building partnerships and influencing senior stakeholders across internal and external organizations, including executive leadership.
• Strong analytical and strategic thinking skills, with the ability to operate autonomously in ambiguous and rapidly evolving environments.
• Comfort operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments where market structures are evolving.

Responsibilities

• Develop and execute strategies that expand Anthropic's access to compute, infrastructure, and emerging AI technologies, and translate those strategies into a pipeline of executable deals.
• Lead the full deal lifecycle for complex infrastructure transactions, from opportunity identification and term sheet development through negotiation, execution, and close.
• Structure creative partnerships that help mitigate strategic supply chain challenges, support emerging technologies, develop ecosystem initiatives, and drive other value propositions for Anthropic.
• Bring capital markets and financial thinking to infrastructure transactions, including supporting project finance, credit and residual value guarantees, vendor financing, equipment leasing, and other structures that connect financing to our compute buildout.
• Develop and evaluate commercial frameworks and compare supply options and architectures across deal structures and deal terms, including partnering with finance teams on deal economics and analysis.
• Provide a clear strategic view of a deal, including value proposition, efficiency metrics, trade-offs, and risk-adjusted outcomes
• Partner with engineering, procurement / sourcing, infrastructure teams, and corporate development to understand future technology strategy and workloads and translate requirements into investment and commercial strategies.
• Build and maintain senior-level relationships across the AI infrastructure ecosystem.
• Drive internal alignment on transaction terms, risk parameters, and strategic priorities with Legal, Financing, and Engineering.
• Manage the internal approval path for large commitments including deal strategy, deal economics, risk analysis, and capital at risk.
• Track market, technology, and financing developments across AI infrastructure, including supply constraints and how competitors are securing capacity, and turn them into clear recommendations and deals for senior leadership.

Skills

AI infrastructure

Strategic partnerships

Compute ecosystem

High-value deals

Capital markets

Ecosystem strategy

Technical collaboration

Stakeholder management

Analytical thinking

Ambiguity tolerance

Job description

Strategic Deals Lead, Compute Infrastructure

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 a Strategic Deals Lead, you will help shape Anthropic's long-term approach to AI infrastructure, compute capacity, and strategic ecosystem partnerships. As Anthropic scales its own internal infrastructure footprint, you will originate, structure, negotiate, and close the deals that put its strategy into effect. Operating at the intersection of infrastructure strategy, technology evaluation, commercial deal-making, and financing, you will identify and execute opportunities that expand Anthropic's access to the compute, infrastructure, and technologies required to train and serve frontier AI systems.

Securing that infrastructure at scale requires sophisticated deal-making with some of the world's largest technology companies, and increasingly it requires connecting deal structure with financing. You’ll go deeper into the silicon supply chain, structuring co-development and early-access deals with semiconductor and emerging hardware companies, and connecting deal structure to financing. You will work closely with engineering, infrastructure, finance, legal, and executive leadership to evaluate emerging technologies, assess build-versus-buy decisions, structure and negotiate the multi-layered silicon transactions that secure access to compute at the chip level and cultivate strategic relationships across the AI ecosystem.

We are looking for people who combine a deep understanding of AI infrastructure and emerging technology ecosystems with strong strategic judgment, financial acumen, and the negotiating skill to close complex agreements at the terms and timelines Anthropic requires. You will be an integral part of a team focused on ensuring Anthropic has the resources it needs to pursue its mission of developing safe, beneficial AI systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and execute strategies that expand Anthropic's access to compute, infrastructure, and emerging AI technologies, and translate those strategies into a pipeline of executable deals.
• Lead the full deal lifecycle for complex infrastructure transactions, from opportunity identification and term sheet development through negotiation, execution, and close.
• Structure creative partnerships that help mitigate strategic supply chain challenges, support emerging technologies, develop ecosystem initiatives, and drive other value propositions for Anthropic.
• Bring capital markets and financial thinking to infrastructure transactions, including supporting project finance, credit and residual value guarantees, vendor financing, equipment leasing, and other structures that connect financing to our compute buildout.
• Develop and evaluate commercial frameworks and compare supply options and architectures across deal structures and deal terms, including partnering with finance teams on deal economics and analysis.
• Provide a clear strategic view of a deal, including value proposition, efficiency metrics, trade-offs, and risk-adjusted outcomes
• Partner with engineering, procurement / sourcing, infrastructure teams, and corporate development to understand future technology strategy and workloads and translate requirements into investment and commercial strategies.
• Build and maintain senior-level relationships across the AI infrastructure ecosystem.
• Drive internal alignment on transaction terms, risk parameters, and strategic priorities with Legal, Financing, and Engineering.
• Manage the internal approval path for large commitments including deal strategy, deal economics, risk analysis, and capital at risk.
• Track market, technology, and financing developments across AI infrastructure, including supply constraints and how competitors are securing capacity, and turn them into clear recommendations and deals for senior leadership.

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience in AI infrastructure including on-premise capacity building, cloud, semiconductors, data centers, backbone, networking, or adjacent technology ecosystems.
• Background in areas such as strategic partnerships, hyperscaler deal structuring, network investments, investment banking, private equity, or infrastructure investments.
• Deep understanding of the compute ecosystem, infrastructure economics, and trends that drive the AI Infrastructure space.
• Demonstrated track record of structuring, negotiating, and closing complex, high-value technology transactions or strategic partnerships as a principal and lead negotiator.
• Working understanding of capital markets, project financing, and structuring financial transactions alongside commercial terms.
• Experience evaluating emerging technologies, developing long-term infrastructure or ecosystem strategies, and converting those strategies into signed agreements.
• Ability to work effectively with technical teams and translate complex engineering concepts into deal structures and strategic business recommendations.
• Experience building partnerships and influencing senior stakeholders across internal and external organizations, including executive leadership.
• Strong analytical and strategic thinking skills, with the ability to operate autonomously in ambiguous and rapidly evolving environments.
• Comfort operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments where market structures are evolving

Preferred Qualifications

• 8-10+ years of experience in strategic deals, corporate development, investment banking, or business development at technology companies, hyperscalers, semiconductor companies, or financial institutions, with direct transactional ownership
• Demonstrated experience managing multiple high-value transactions simultaneously
• Familiarity with requirements and process for AI Infrastructure buildouts including AI accelerators, the overall silicon ecosystem, and supply chain.
• Direct experience in multi-layered silicon transactions.
• Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure requirements, including training cluster design, network topology, and capacity planning
• Experience with vendor financing, equipment leasing, structured or project finance, or capital markets transactions applied to infrastructure procurement
• A passion for the future of AI infrastructure and for Anthropic's mission of ensuring safe AI developments

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.

$265,000 - $325,000 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 aboutour policy for using AI in our application process.

Voluntary Self-Identification

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.

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

• Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)
• Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS
• Blind or low vision
• Cancer (past or present)
• Cardiovascular or heart disease
• Celiac disease
• Cerebral palsy
• Deaf or serious difficulty hearing
• Diabetes
• Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders
• Epilepsy or other seizure disorder
• Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome
• Intellectual or developmental disability
• Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD
• Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
• Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports
• Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)
• Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities
• Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)
• Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema
• Short stature (dwarfism)
• Traumatic brain injury