Strategic Projects Lead, Recruiting

EngineersOfAI; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a Strategic Projects Lead to coordinate recruiting's most complex, cross-team initiatives. You will bring structure, drive alignment across Hiring, Analytics, and Interview Programs, and serve as the senior individual contributor who shapes how recruiting operates as the company scales.

This high-autonomy role rewards clear decision-making, documentation, and scalable process design. You will move work forward through partnership, not ownership, and build trust with senior

Qualifications

• 8–10+ years in program management, business operations, chief of staff, or people/talent roles at a fast-growing company.
• Experience in a talent team or partnering closely with one to understand recruiting operations.
• Ability to think in systems, connect components, and design cross-team fixes.
• Proven ability to manage multiple complex workstreams and prioritize effectively.
• Set the strategy and vision for your area rather than executing others' plans.
• Create structure in genuinely ambiguous environments and maintain clarity.
• Experience applying AI to real workflows to redesign processes and speed up work.
• Test small versions of ideas in real-world settings and communicate trade-offs clearly.

Responsibilities

• Take on recruiting's biggest ambiguous bets: define the problem, ship the smallest testable version, and hand off as repeatable programs.
• Own the operating rhythm across teams supporting recruiting to plan, review, and decide as one function.
• Spot recurring friction and fix the underlying system, not just the one-off case.
• Own process design when company-wide changes run through recruiting and drive adoption with partners.
• Be recruiting's DRI for headcount and workforce planning, including hiring pace for new regions.
• Own the interviewing standard, including lead time and interviewer load; diagnose when it slips.
• Turn analytics into standards and SOPs and document for future leaders to pick up.
• Keep the right people informed at the right time without becoming a bottleneck; stay fluent in recruiting systems and data.

Skills

Program management

Talent ops collaboration

Systems thinking

Prioritization

Strategy & vision

Ambiguity handling

AI workflow automation

End-to-end ownership

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

We're looking for a Strategic Projects Lead to take on recruiting's most complex, cross-cutting work: the high-stakes decisions and initiatives that span many teams and don't fit neatly into any one group's remit. You'll bring the structure, coordination, and follow-through that help these get made well, and see them through as the company scales.

You'll work across every team that touches hiring, and you'll move work forward through partnership, not ownership. The job is influence: bring the right people together, make sure decisions are principled and well-documented, and keep recruiting's approach coherent over time. You'll be the most senior individual contributor for how recruiting operates, and success depends as much as on building trust across senior stakeholders with different priorities as it does on building good systems.

This is a high-autonomy role for someone who thrives in complexity and ambiguity. You know recruiting well enough to feel where it breaks, and you're energized by holding several very different problems at once and driving each to a clear resolution.

Key responsibilities

• Take on recruiting's biggest ambiguous bets: define the problem, ship the smallest testable version, and hand each one off as a repeatable program before moving to the next
• Own the operating rhythm across the teams that support recruiting, so we plan, review, and decide as one function
• Spot recurring friction and fix the system behind it, not just the case in front of you
• Own process design when company-wide changes run through recruiting, and drive them to real adoption with the partners who own the build and the comms
• Be recruiting's DRI for headcount and workforce planning, including hiring pace and readiness for new regions
• Own the operating standard for interviewing, like scheduling lead time and interviewer load, and lead the cross-team diagnosis when it slips
• Turn analytics into standards and simple SOPs, and build documentation a new leader could pick up without you in the room
• Keep the right people informed at the right time without becoming a bottleneck, and stay fluent in our recruiting systems and data so you can call the downstream impact of any decision

You'll partner directly with the leads for Recruiting Systems, Analytics, Interview Programs, and other teams. You won't run their teams or build their systems, but you'll know each well enough to make calls that hold up across all of them.

Minimum qualifications

• Have 8-10+ years in program management, business operations, chief of staff, or people/talent roles at a fast-growing company, with increasing scope over time
• Have been part of a talent team or partnered closely with one, and understand how recruiting operates day to day
• Think in systems: you see how the pieces connect, anticipate downstream effects, and design fixes that work across team boundaries
• Have owned several complex workstreams at once and made hard prioritization calls without much guidance
• Set the strategy and vision for your area rather than executing someone else's plan
• Create structure and clarity in genuinely ambiguous environments
• Have put AI to work in real workflows: redesigning process, automating the repetitive layer, and shipping faster
• Test the smallest version of an idea in the real world before building the big one, and say clearly what you're not doing and why
• Can lose a decision cleanly: disagree, commit, and execute with full credibility, knowing which calls are reversible and which aren't
• Have taken a big process or policy change through an organization end to end and made it stick
• Close the loop, hold the bar, and finish the unglamorous work

Preferred qualifications

• Experience running recruiting or talent operations at globa