Strategic Business Development Lead

Anthropic•San Francisco, NY

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Anthropic is seeking a business development lead to manage and grow its partnership footprint with a select group of the world's largest technology companies. This role involves overseeing complex, multi-faceted relationships that span various business units within partner organizations, including consumer products, devices, software, cloud platforms, commerce, and enterprise distribution. The primary focus is on product and distribution partnerships, requiring the individual to identify co-development opportunities, structure commercial and technical terms, and ensure durable partnerships. The role demands a seasoned dealmaker capable of managing multiple concurrent deal streams within a single partner, ensuring coherence and strategic alignment. This is an individual contributor position for someone comfortable engaging with senior executives, navigating ambiguous situations, and leading complex negotiations from inception to execution.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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

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