Head of Partner Success

Details

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The team is a quickly growing group of researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

Role overview

You will build Partner Success at Anthropic from scratch: hire the first partner success managers, define how they run portfolios, and personally carry a portfolio of partners as the reference implementation. You'll decide which partners get managed attention, design engagement models (proactive vs reactive vs programmatic enablement), and shape how the team organizes coverage by industry, region, or partner type. The role requires defining what good Claude work looks like across many customer engagements and writing the playbook for partners to deploy frontier AI.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead the Partner Success team from scratch: hire first partner success managers, create onboarding and methodology, and build the operating system the team uses.
• Personally carry a portfolio of managed partners as the reference implementation and be the standard for how portfolios are run.
• Design and decide criteria for entry into and graduation from the managed portfolio; reshape criteria using data.
• Design the team’s engagement model: define when proactive engagement is warranted, when reactive engagement is triggered, and when partners are served by routing, programmatic enablement, or certified bench.
• Run joint planning and quarterly business reviews with managed partners; set joint goals on customer adoption, certified architects, references, and industry positioning.
• Drive scalable enablement so partner architects are trained on new Claude capabilities as they ship and the partner bench applies new features at scale.
• Drive adoption, retention, and expansion in the joint customer book: track account health, surface stalls early, bring the right people in to unblock, and turn at-risk accounts around.
• Drive industry specialization across the managed partner book; coach partners to commit to industry lanes and publish reference work.
• Steward co-investment funding decisions; own where Anthropic invests co-investment dollars based on outcomes, not consultant hours.
• Interlock with Anthropic’s direct sales field and alliances organization; define handoffs, train both sides, and enforce them.
• Define regional coverage model as the portfolio grows and hire accordingly.
• Instrument the managed partner portfolio: track consumption growth by partner, sourced and influenced pipeline, time-to-first-deal, adoption-retention-expansion trends, and partner health trajectory.

Requirements

• 6–10 years of experience working with consulting and systems integration partners at a software company, cloud platform, or partner-led business, with at least two years managing a team.
• Experience building or scaling a partner-facing team from scratch (hiring, onboarding, methodology creation), not just managing an existing team.
• Deep understanding of partner success in a usage-based business; experience being measured by adoption, retention, and expansion rather than contract signatures.
• Strong commercial instincts on partner selection and co-investment funding; ability to identify partners that will deliver customer outcomes.
• Experience running scalable partner or practitioner enablement, or strong desire to learn it; understanding how to design training that changes practitioner behavior.
• Sufficient technical fluency to be credible in an architecture review (no coding required), able to follow partner architects and ask the second question.
• Regular use of Claude or another large language model in daily work (not as a chat tool) — e.g., to prepare partner reviews, draft account plans, analyze pipeline, and coach teams. Candidates should be ready to walk through a recent deliverable that used an LLM.
• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.

Strong candidates may also have

• Direct experience with global systems integrators (Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, Infosys, TCS, Wipro) and understanding of how their delivery practices are built.
• Experience at a company transitioning from product-led to partner-led motion.
• Experience stewarding co-investment funding at scale and opinions about what works.
• Experience building vertical industry motions where partners specialize by industry.
• Experience designing engagement models for small teams covering large ecosystems (proactive-reactive-automated splits).

Compensation

Annual Salary: $300,000 - $355,000 USD

(For sales roles the range would be OTE; this specific posting lists the annual salary range above.)

Logistics & other details

• Location(s): San Francisco, CA; New York City, NY; Seattle, WA. The company expects staff to be in one of its offices at least ~25% of the time; some roles may require more time in office.
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic states they do sponsor visas and will make reasonable efforts and retain an immigration lawyer to assist when an offer is made.
• The application asks whether candidates are open to relocation; the posting does not state relocation assistance explicitly.

Benefits

Anthropic offers competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and office space for in-person collaboration.