Research Operations Lead
Anthropic
Research Operations Lead
Anthropic
Builds Claude AI models with a focus on safety
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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-handling 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.
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.
For roles performing work in California: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records or criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.
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.
Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.
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.
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.
Annual Salary: 210000 - 260000 USD
Anthropic builds the Claude family of AI models and sells them to businesses, software developers, and consumers, with research on making AI safe and understandable at the center of its work. In 2024 it introduced the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting AI assistants to outside apps and data that OpenAI and Google adopted the next year. People use the Claude app to write and analyze files, programmers hand coding tasks to Claude Code, and companies build Claude into their own products through its API. Anthropic earns money from subscriptions, business plans, and usage-based API fees. Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei founded Anthropic in 2021 with other former OpenAI employees, and it is based in San Francisco.
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