Vendor and Contract Manager, Safeguards

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

As the Vendor and Contract Manager on the Safeguards team, you will own the end-to-end lifecycle of Anthropic's safety-critical vendor, partner, and consultant relationships — from identifying and selecting vendors through contract negotiation, onboarding, ongoing performance management, and renewal. The vendors and partners you'll manage span verification, threat intelligence, process outsourcing, capability evaluation, civil society consultation, and research collaboration.

You'll build repeatable processes where they're needed while staying nimble enough to handle novel partnership structures, like research collaborations, civil society consultations, and model red-teaming engagements that don't fit neatly into standard procurement workflows. You'll work closely with legal, procurement, finance, and engineering teams, and you'll be the person who knows where every Safeguards contract stands, what we're spending, and where we should consider a change.

This is a role for someone who's comfortable operating across commercial, legal, and technical contexts in a fast-moving environment — someone who can negotiate contract terms, work with legal teams to redline contracts, set up model access for a research partner, and handle a vendor performance issue in one day.

*Important context for this role: In this position you may be exposed to and engage with explicit content spanning a range of topics, including those of a sexual, violent, or psychologically disturbing nature.

Responsibilities:

Vendor Selection & Onboarding

• Understand the broad vendor landscape for Safeguards and drive vendor selection processes with expert input, factoring in tradeoffs between capability, price, and internal resources across categories including verification, threat intelligence, process outsourcing, and capability evaluation
• Conduct vendor due diligence and coordinate security and data governance reviews for vendors handling sensitive model access or content
• Forecast future partnership needs and proactively research vendors and partners that could meet emerging Safeguards requirements

Contract & Budget Management

• Manage contracts across the Safeguards vendor and partner portfolio, working with legal and procurement teams on contract redlining, negotiation, and execution
• Work with legal teams and potential research partners to develop novel agreements for research collaboration, civil society consultation, and model red-teaming
• Handle invoicing, payment, and renewal processes with partners
• Own Safeguards vendor budget tracking and planning in partnership with finance teams, maintaining a clear picture of current spend and forecasting future needs

Ongoing Vendor & Partner Management

• Manage vendor and researcher access to models and products during testing phases and trials
• Oversee and monitor vendor performance and usage, flagging issues and resolving concerns and disputes as they arise
• Report on vendor performance, spend, and contract status to Safeguards leadership

You may be a good fit if you have:

• 5+ years in vendor management, procurement, or contract operations, ideally in risk, fraud, compliance, or trust & safety contexts at a technology company
• Demonstrated experience reviewing and negotiating contracts, including comfort with redlining and working alongside legal counsel
• Track record managing vendor budgets, including forecasting, tracking spend, and making tradeoff recommendations
• Understanding of AI safety, account abuse, or platform integrity issues — you know what verification vendors, threat intelligence providers, and content screening tools actually do
• Experience onboarding vendors and standing up new vendor relationships from scratch, not just managing existing ones
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, particularly with legal, procurement, finance, and engineering teams
• Comfort with ambiguity and fast-moving environments — you've built or significantly improved vendor management processes, not just inherited them

Nice to have:

• Experience in AI safety or AI-adjacent vendor ecosystems
• Familiarity with procurement tools such as Ironclad or Zip

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:

$245,000—$285,000 USD

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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 links—visit 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. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process