Strategic Sourcing Business Partner, R&D Operations

Location: San Francisco, CA or Seattle, WA; hybrid, with staff expected to work from one of the offices at least 25% of the time. Some roles may require more office time.

Annual salary: $190,000–$230,000 USD.

Company

Anthropic develops reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems intended to be safe and beneficial for users and society.

What you will do

• Own the commercial side of the Human Data Operations and R&D services vendor portfolio, including MSAs, SOWs, order forms, amendments, renewals, redlines, templates, pricing exhibits, and fallback positions.
• Lead pricing and commercial negotiations, design pricing models, align deal structures with R&D consumption, and track savings, cost avoidance, and improved terms.
• Build sourcing playbooks and Claude-powered tools for redlining, negotiation preparation, benchmarking, and vendor reporting.
• Develop competitive supplier coverage through RFPs, second sources, flexible volume structures, and competitive pricing.
• Manage vendor performance through QBRs, scorecards, SLA and quality reporting, escalations, remedies, and contract compliance.
• Partner with R&D, Procurement Operations, Legal, Finance & Strategy, Security, and TPRM on vendor capacity, budgets, forecasts, risk, approvals, audit rights, and data-handling terms.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in strategic sourcing, category management, vendor management, or commercial negotiation, primarily across services categories such as data services, BPO, outsourced operations, lab or research services, managed services, or staffing.
• Hands-on experience personally redlining MSAs and SOWs, building templates and fallback positions, and identifying commercial value in pricing exhibits, volume commitments, termination rights, SLAs and remedies, IP, and data terms.
• Experience personally leading multi-million-dollar services negotiations to strong outcomes.
• Ability to assess leverage across multiple vendors and concurrent deals, determine the appropriate negotiation depth, and maintain commercially tough but fair vendor relationships.
• Strong analytical skills in rate and unit-cost analysis, total-cost-of-ownership modeling, and pricing model design.
• Experience managing services vendors through SLAs, scorecards, QBRs, escalations, and performance enforcement.
• Comfort operating at pace with high deal volume, ambiguity, imperfect information, and a bias toward execution.
• Clear, direct communication with internal executives and external stakeholders, including during difficult conversations and escalations.
• Fluency with AI tools in daily work and demonstrated experience rebuilding workflows around them.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience in a field relevant to the role through coursework, training, or professional experience.

Nice to have

• Experience sourcing human data, data labeling, annotation, evaluation vendors, BPO, or outsourced operations, with a perspective on the market’s direction.
• Experience sourcing lab services, scientific equipment and consumables, robotics or hardware services, or other technical services for a research organization.
• Experience renegotiating or restructuring vendor pricing and contract structures at a hypergrowth company.
• Experience establishing sourcing coverage for a category from scratch, including templates, playbooks, and benchmarks.
• Experience designing vendor scorecards, SLA frameworks, and performance management programs.
• Familiarity with confidentiality, data-handling, and IP terms relevant to research and data vendors.
• A demonstrated perspective on how AI will change services vendor relationships and negotiations, supported by practical experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative environment focused on large-scale AI research and long-term impact.
• Flexible working hours and an office environment for collaboration.
• Competitive compensation, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation, and parental leave.
• Visa sponsorship may be available, with reasonable efforts and immigration-lawyer support for eligible offers.

Hiring process

• Applicants may use AI during the application process according to Anthropic’s candidate AI usage guidance.