Strategic Projects Lead, Recruiting

Socket.dev; San Francisco, New York, Seattle (CA, NY, WA); Hybrid; USD 235,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity donation matching (optional)

Generous vacation & parental leave

Flexible working hours

Office space in San Francisco

Job summary

Anthropic seeks a Strategic Projects Lead to drive recruiting’s most complex, cross-cutting work. You’ll shape problems, orchestrate multiple teams, and ensure decisions are well-documented and principled. This high-autonomy role focuses on building trusted, scalable recruiting systems across the organization.

You’ll be the senior IC for recruiting operations, partnering with Analytics, Interview Programs, and Recruiting Systems leads to maintain coherence and impact as the company scales.

Qualifications

• 8–10+ years in program management, business ops, chief of staff, or people/talent roles at fast-growing companies.
• Experience with talent teams and understanding recruiting operations daily.
• Ability to design cross-team systems and resolve complex problems.

Responsibilities

• Define big ambiguous bets, ship minimal testable versions, and turn into repeatable programs.
• Coordinate recruiting across teams to plan, review, and decide as one function.
• Identify recurring friction and fix underlying systems, not just individual cases.
• Design processes during company-wide changes and drive adoption.
• Serve as DRI for headcount and workforce planning, including regional readiness.
• Set interviewing standards, schedule lead times, and monitor interviewer load.
• Translate analytics into standards and create simple SOPs for future leaders.
• Keep stakeholders informed and avoid bottlenecks while using recruiting systems and data.

Skills

Program management

Business operations

Chief of staff

Talent / People operations

Systems thinking

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.

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 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.

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.