Head of Partnerships
About the job
- Experience in enterprise technology, with a substantial portion leading partner, alliances, or channel businesses in Japan.
- People leadership experience over partner or alliance teams, with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong performers.
- Direct experience building a partner business in Japan for a US or global technology company, ideally through a period of rapid growth or market entry in a hyperscaler, enterprise SaaS, data, or AI platform context.
- Proven ownership of partner-sourced and partner-influenced revenue targets at a country or regional level, with forecasting discipline.
- Established executive relationships with Japan's major system integrators and consulting firms, with a reputation they would vouch for.
- Experience negotiating complex partnership structures, including resale agreements, joint solution development, and revenue-sharing or incentive models.
- Demonstrated ability to operate as a player-coach, personally owning strategic relationships while building a team that scales beyond you.
- Comfort shaping strategy in ambiguity and turning it into an operating plan while working closely with global teams in other time zones.
- Business-level fluency in Japanese and English, and cultural fluency to move between Japanese enterprise norms and a fast-moving US company.
- Based in Tokyo.
- Bachelor's degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience; a field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.
- Hire, develop, and retain a high-performing Japan partner team spanning GSI, regional SI, and reseller coverage, sized and structured to the market opportunity.
- Set clear goals, territories, and partner portfolios for each team member, and hold the team accountable to pipeline, revenue, and attach-rate outcomes.
- Establish the team's operating cadence, including one-on-ones, weekly pipeline reviews, deal inspection, partner QBRs, and quarterly business planning.
- Coach the team on executive engagement, joint business planning, and co-selling in Japanese enterprise accounts, and model those behaviors personally.
- Define which partner segments, partners, and motions Anthropic prioritizes in Japan, and in what sequence, based on revenue potential, customer reach, and strategic fit.
- Design the partner coverage model across the partner landscape, including NTT DATA, Fujitsu, NEC, Hitachi, Accenture, and others, determining where to go deep versus broad.
- Localize Anthropic's global partner program for Japan, including tiers, incentives, enablement paths, and rules of engagement, and feed Japan requirements into global program design.
- Own the annual and quarterly partner business plan for Japan and report on it to International Partnerships leadership.
- Own executive relationships with Anthropic's most consequential partners in Japan, from joint business planning through board-level sponsorship on both sides.
- Negotiate and structure partnership agreements, including resale, co-development, and revenue-sharing constructs, working with Legal, Finance, and Deal Desk.
- Lead creation of joint solutions and industry offerings with partner practices in manufacturing, financial services, retail, telecommunications, life sciences, and the public sector.
- Carry the Japan partner-sourced and partner-influenced pipeline and revenue targets, and the partner attach-rate target, for the team.
- Run a disciplined forecast with the team and Japan sales leadership, ensuring partner deals are registered, progressed, and closed predictably.
- Decide where to deploy partner investments, including market development funds, enablement, co-marketing, and headcount, for the highest return.
- Build reporting and systems hygiene that gives International Partnerships and Anthropic leadership a clear, trusted view of the Japan partner business.
- Act as the single point of accountability for the partner business in Japan with Japan sales leadership, Applied AI, Marketing, Legal, and Product.
- Ensure Japanese partner and customer requirements, including language, data residency, security, and sovereignty needs, are understood and prioritized by global product and engineering teams.
- Partner with the Japan sales leader to embed partners into account planning and co-selling for the country's priority accounts.
- Resolve channel conflict between direct sales, SIs, and resellers, and set rules of engagement that keep the ecosystem healthy as it grows.
- Represent Anthropic at partner executive forums, industry conferences, and analyst engagements related to the partner ecosystem.
- Sponsor development of Japanese customer success stories delivered with partners that resonate with Japanese enterprise buyers.
- Build Anthropic's reputation as the partner-first AI company in Japan through the team's day-to-day work.
- 15 to 20+ years in enterprise technology leading partner, alliances, or channel businesses in Japan, and 5+ years of people leadership over partner or alliance teams.
- Experience with AI, data, or cloud platform partnerships, including partner-built solutions and marketplace motions.
- Experience on the partner side inside a Japanese SI or distributor, and an understanding of how those organizations make decisions.
- Experience localizing a global partner program for Japan and influencing its design.
- Experience working alongside professional services or applied AI teams to deliver partner-led customer outcomes.
About the company
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.
Company Size
5,001-10,000
Company Stage
N/A
Total Funding
$224.8B
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Founded
2021
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Sales are multiplying: Anthropic's yearly revenue pace topped $65 billion in July 2026, over sevenfold since December 2025.
- IPO plans advanced: October 2026 reports describe investor meetings and a mid-November listing target; staff shares face lockups.
- Lower office minimum: 627 of 646 Anthropic job posts in October 2026 require at least 25% office time.
What critics are saying
- Job security rides on growth: Anthropic's IPO prospectus lists $518 billion in cloud and computing bills due in coming years.
- Defense work stays off-limits: in September 2026, appeals judges voted 2-1 to let the Pentagon keep blacklisting Anthropic.
- Growth is priced in: Anthropic's valuation reached $965 billion in May 2026, up from $380 billion in February.
What makes Anthropic unique
- Investors don't control its board alone: Anthropic's independent Long-Term Benefit Trust elects a growing number of directors.
- It isn't tied to one chipmaker: Claude runs on Nvidia GPUs plus custom AI chips designed by Google and Amazon.
- It holds back its riskiest model: Claude Mythos 5.1, launched September 2026, goes only to vetted cyberdefenders and life scientists.
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Benefits
Flexible Work Hours
Paid Vacation
Parental Leave
Hybrid Work Options
Company Equity
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6 month growth
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-3%Anthropic PBC told prospective investors its third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The artificial intelligence model maker is pushing ahead with plans to go public.
Anthropic, a US-based AI company, opened its fifth Asia-Pacific office in Singapore on October 14. It also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI) on AI safety and responsible adoption. The agreement covers technical exchanges on model evaluation, testing standards, and incident response. It also includes research on AI adoption and its impact. Anthropic joined the generative AI evaluation sandbox run by the Infocomm Media Development Authority and the AI Verify Foundation in 2023, the year it launched. GovTech, Grab, and DBS use Claude in Singapore. More than 1,500 GovTech engineers and technical staff use Claude Code. Anthropic raised $65 billion in May 2026 at a $965 billion valuation.
Strict liability, which would make AI companies legally responsible for any harm their models cause, is gaining support as a way to force better safety controls. The New York Times editorialised in favour of it, and a Forecasting Research Institute survey of 157 experts, 49 superforecasters, 132 AI risk experts, and 540 members of the public rated it more effective than US federal licensing alone. The push follows reports of "rogue AI" incidents. An Anthropic agent tried to fill in State Department visa forms and sent a false murder tip to Philadelphia police. The White House has ordered frontier AI firms to disclose such incidents. Critics note that liability applies only after harm occurs, could bankrupt firms, is hard to apply to open source models, and may push AI companies to compete with their customers.
Anthropic will acquire Opaque, a company that specialises in confidential computing and AI. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Opaque partnered with Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, and Google on confidential computing. It raised a $24 million series B round at a $300 million valuation, then rolled out a security framework adopted in Europe and the UAE. Recently, Opaque has been releasing open standards for sovereign AI and on-premise deployments. That fits Anthropic's growing appeal to enterprises seeking on-premise deployments, open models, and sovereign AI architectures. Opaque chief executive officer Aaron Fulkerson said the agreement "carries OPAQUE's work forward.
AI founders and venture capitalists welcomed the White House's hands-off approach to regulation at San Francisco's Tech Week last week. President Donald Trump recently hosted tech leaders in Washington to sign a voluntary, 308-word AI safety pact, which he called "almost a constitution." The deal asks advanced AI labs to follow safety protocols and set up internal teams to oversee their own progress. Signatories include OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, SpaceXAI, and Nvidia. At an event hosted by Andreessen Horowitz, PitchBook's Kyle Stanford noted that US defence spending reaches $1 trillion for the first time, with $13.5 billion going to autonomous systems and AI. Critics disagree. Former OpenAI safety head David Robinson said self-regulation is no substitute for strong legislation.