Strategic Projects Lead, Recruiting

Anthropic; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 235,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a Strategic Projects Lead to orchestrate recruiting's most complex, cross-cutting initiatives. You will create structure, coordinate multiple teams, and ensure decisions are principled and well-documented as we scale.

You will partner with Recruiting Systems, Analytics, Interview Programs, and other teams, serving as the most senior IC for recruiting operations. This role demands comfort with ambiguity and a talent for building trust across senior stakeholders.

Qualifications

• 8-10+ years in program management, business operations, chief of staff, or people/talent roles at a fast-growing company.
• Experience with talent teams or close partnership with one.
• Ability to design systems that span multiple teams and boundaries.
• Experience leading several complex workstreams concurrently and prioritizing effectively.
• Sets strategy and vision for their area rather than executing others' plans.
• Creates structure in genuinely ambiguous environments.
• Experience applying AI to real workflows to redesign processes, automate repetitive tasks, and speed up delivery.
• Tests small versions of ideas in real-world settings and communicates what is not being done and why.
• Able to disagree, commit, and execute with credibility and understand reversibility of calls.
• Led end-to-end changes to processes or policies and ensured adoption.
• Turns around complex programs to deliver results under ambiguity.

Responsibilities

• Define problems, ship smallest testable version, and hand off as repeatable programs.
• Own the operating rhythm across teams supporting recruiting to enable plan, review, and decision-making.
• Identify recurring friction and fix underlying systems, not only individual cases.
• Design processes during company-wide changes and drive adoption with partner teams.
• Act as DRI for headcount and workforce planning, including hiring pace and regional readiness.
• Own interviewing standards and coordinating scheduling and interviewer load across teams.
• Translate analytics into standards and simple SOPs with maintainable documentation.
• Keep stakeholders informed without creating bottlenecks and maintain systems fluency to assess downstream impact.

Skills

Program management

Talent partnerships

Systems thinking

Managing multiple workstreams

Strategic planning

AI in workflow automation

Prototyping small-scale tests

Decisive decision making

End-to-end process design

Education

Bachelor's degree

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.

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.

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

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 global scale
• Working knowledge of recruiting compliance, like OFCCP, GDPR, and regional employment law, and how it shapes process and systems decisions
• Experience in deep-tech environments with technical recruiting complexity
• Experience operating across multiple time zones and jurisdictions

Annual Salary

$235,000-$300,000 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.

About the Company

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.

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.

Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage

Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.