Corporate Finance & Strategy, R&D Opex

Corporate Finance & Strategy, R&D Opex

San Francisco, CA | Seattle, WA

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 are seeking a Strategic Finance partner to join our Finance team at Anthropic, focused on operating expenses (OpEx) with a primary partnership across our Engineering organization. In this role, you will be the financial partner to engineering leaders helping them make smart, well-informed decisions about headcount, vendor spend, tooling, and the operational investments that fuel our research and product work. As we continue to grow rapidly, you will play a crucial role in shaping how we plan, allocate, and steward OpEx across the company.

You'll build driver-based models that tie vendor and tooling spend to the underlying technical inputs (usage, seats, throughput, capacity), and you'll be expected to engage substantively with engineering leaders on the technical realities behind those drivers and to push back with conviction when the numbers don't add up. The strongest partners on this team aren't order-takers; they ask sharp questions, challenge assumptions, and help engineering leaders land on better decisions than they'd reach alone. If you're excited about getting close to the technology, holding your ground in a debate with a thoughtful engineering leader, and helping a fast-growing AI company invest its resources well, we'd love to hear from you.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary finance partner to Engineering leaders, providing guidance and recommendations on vendor and tooling spend, and resource allocation decisions.
• Build and maintain driver-based financial models for engineering OpEx tying vendor and tooling spend to the underlying technical drivers (usage, seats, throughput, capacity, utilization) rather than top-down growth assumptions
• Develop a deep understanding of the engineering tooling and vendor stack so you can engage substantively with technical leaders on what's driving spend and where it's headed
• Lead budgeting, forecasting, and long-range planning for the engineering organization, partnering with leaders to translate roadmaps into resource plans
• Push back constructively on assumptions, proposals, and forecasts bringing data, sharp questions, and clear reasoning to help engineering leaders land on better decisions
• Prepare clear, concise financial reports, analyses, and variance commentary that highlight key trends, risks, and opportunities for engineering and finance stakeholders
• Establish reporting dashboards and scorecards that track engineering headcount, vendor spend efficiency, and other key operational metrics
• Drive analyses on build-vs-buy decisions, vendor consolidation, contract negotiations, and organizational design tradeoffs where finance can sharpen engineering decision-making
• Partner cross-functionally with Strategic Finance, FP&A, Accounting, Recruiting, and People teams to ensure engineering plans are aligned with broader financial strategy
• Participate in resource allocation exercises to ensure clarity around headcount prioritization

Minimum Qualifications

• Have experience in FP&A, OpEx or G&A finance preferably at high-growth technology companies
• Have demonstrated experience building driver-based financial models tying spend to operational and technical inputs rather than top-down growth rates
• Are comfortable with technical concepts and have a genuine interest in understanding the systems, tools, and infrastructure behind the line items you're modeling
• Have a track record of pushing back constructively on senior stakeholders bringing data and clear reasoning to disagreements rather than deferring to the loudest voice in the room
• Demonstrate excellent communication and storytelling abilities, with experience presenting to C-suite executives and board members
• Have a bias toward action, strong work ethic, and experience driving operational outcomes under tight timelines
• Thrive in fast-paced, dynamic environments and can navigate ambiguity with confidence
• Possess strong collaboration skills and can build effective partnerships across functions and levels
• Are passionate about Anthropic's mission to build safe, beneficial AI systems

Preferred Qualifications

• Have experience at a high-growth technology company or startup
• Possess expertise with modern financial planning tools (e.g., Anaplan, Pigment)
• Have direct experience partnering with Engineering, R&D, or other technical organizations as a finance business partner
• Have hands-on experience modeling vendor spend with technical drivers cloud/SaaS usage, seat-based tooling, observability and data infrastructure costs, etc.
• Possess a technical background or coursework (CS, engineering, quantitative field) or comparable self-taught fluency
• Have experience leading headcount planning and workforce modeling at scale

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.

Annual Salary:

$235,000 - $310,000 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 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 linksvisit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

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.