Strategic Business Development Lead

About the role

We're seeking a business development lead to own Anthropic's BD partnership footprint with a small number of the world's largest and most consequential technology companies. These are not single-threaded accounts. Each relationship spans many businesses at once — consumer products, devices and operating systems, productivity and collaboration software, cloud and developer platforms, commerce, and enterprise distribution. Your job is to see the whole board, decide where Anthropic should lean in and where it shouldn't, and turn that judgment into signed deals.

The center of gravity for this role is product and distribution partnerships: co-developing opportunities with partners, and structuring the commercial, technical, and go-to-market terms that make those partnerships durable. You'll typically be running several deal streams inside the same partner in parallel — at different stages, with different counterparts, and with terms that interact with one another — and you'll be the person responsible for keeping them coherent.

This is an individual contributor role for a seasoned dealmaker who is comfortable as the primary counterpart to senior executives at very large companies, who brings strong judgment to ambiguous, high-stakes situations, and who can carry a complex, multi-party negotiation from first conversation through signature and into execution.

Key responsibilities

• Manage a small number of large, multi-faceted partner relationships end to end: set the strategy for each relationship, decide which opportunities to pursue and in what order, and stay accountable for the overall health and commercial output of the partnership across every surface it touches
• Lead product partnerships: identify and structure opportunities to embed Claude in partners' consumer and enterprise products, co-develop new products and features, and define the product, technical, data, and brand terms that come with them, working closely with Anthropic's product and engineering leaders
• Run multiple deal streams in parallel: manage several concurrent negotiations within the same partner — product integrations, distribution and go-to-market, commercial and consumption agreements, and infrastructure — and sequence and connect them so terms in one stream reinforce rather than undercut the others
• Negotiate complex, first-of-kind agreements: lead end-to-end negotiations involving novel commercial structures, revenue and economics sharing, product and roadmap commitments, exclusivity and competitive provisions, data terms, and multi-year, multi-component value exchanges
• Act as an executive counterpart: build and manage relationships with senior executives and their teams on the partner side, serve as Anthropic's primary voice into the partnership, and prepare and steer Anthropic's own executives through partner-level engagements
• Exercise judgment on behalf of Anthropic: weigh commercial upside against strategic, competitive, product, and mission considerations; know when to say no; and make clear, well-reasoned recommendations to Anthropic leadership on trade-offs that don't have a playbook
• Drive cross-functional execution: coordinate Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance, Legal, and Policy across the life of a partnership, from initial structuring through negotiation, launch, and ongoing governance, ensuring what we sign is something Anthropic can deliver

Minimum qualifications

• Direct experience owning a large, multi-business partner relationship, where you were responsible for the whole relationship rather than a single deal or product line
• Track record of structuring and closing product partnerships — embedding technology into partner products, co-developed products, distribution through partner surfaces, or similar — in addition to conventional commercial agreements
• Experience personally leading complex, multi-stakeholder negotiations with senior executives, including deals with interlocking terms, competitive sensitivities, and multi-year commitments
• Demonstrated ability to manage several significant negotiations at the same time without losing the thread on any of them
• Experience coordinating cross-functional execution (e.g., Product, Engineering, Legal, Finance) to bring a complex agreement from structuring through signature and delivery

Preferred qualifications

• 10+ years in strategic business development, strategic partnerships, or corporate development at technology companies, with meaningful time spent managing relationships with very large technology partners
• Experience on either side of a partnership between a foundation model or AI platform provider and a large technology company
• Experience working inside one of the very large technology companies, with a practical understanding of how decisions get made, who holds budget and roadmap authority, and how to navigate them
• Experience with partnerships that span both consumer and enterprise businesses, or that combine product, distribution, and infrastructure components in a single relationship
• Understanding of foundation model capabilities and how they translate into partner products, with enough technical fluency to work credibly with product and engineering leaders on both sides
• Background in corporate development, strategy, or a legal or finance discipline involving structuring and papering unusually complex agreements

Annual Salary: 300000 - 365000 USD