Commercial Counsel, Compute & Infrastructure
AnthropicAbout 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 a Commercial Counsel for Compute and Infrastructure at Anthropic, you'll lead legal execution for Anthropic's infrastructure transactions. These could span the spectrum of server rack compute, networking, semiconductor procurement and development, robotics, manufacturing and supply chain operations, direct datacenter leases, construction agreements, energy procurement, data center operations and the financing structures that enable infrastructure investments at massive scale. You'll work in close partnership with Anthropic teammates in Frontier Legal, Security, Litigation and Public Policy in addition to specialized outside counsel, serving as the in-house coordinator who ensures external work product aligns with Anthropic's commercial objectives and integrates with our overall compute strategy.
Responsibilities:
- Negotiate strategic agreements with key technology partners, major developers, and represent some of Anthropic’s largest and lengthiest capital commitments
- Support, structure, and negotiate hardware development and procurement agreement, capacity reservation agreements, power purchase agreements, negotiate utility interconnection agreements, and manage utility-related legal requirements or initiatives (e.g., renewables)
- Coordinate construction and adjacent agreements including design-build contracts, equipment procurement, and commissioning schedules; manage the related legal workstreams
- Work closely with specialized outside counsel, ensuring their work product aligns with Anthropic’s commercial objectives
- Collaborate with the Compute team’s transaction managers who handle operational execution and project management, providing legal and risk management expertise
- Coordinate with finance and corporate development on strategic deal structuring
- Understand how datacenter legal structures interact with the compute capacity they will house; e.g., power requirements, cooling specifications, security standards, and expansion rights that flow from decisions made in the Compute organization
- Escalate novel structures or terms that create downstream risk for operational flexibility; ensure facility designs accommodate AI-specific requirements including high density power, liquid cooling infrastructure, and rapid scaling capacity.
You may be a good fit if you have:
- JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar
- At least 8-12+ years of relevant legal experience with meaningful exposure to cloud-hardware development and procurement, semiconductor procurement or development, networking, supply chain/logistics, datacenter construction, real-estate, colos or data center operations.
- Fluency in commercial real estate and construction contracting; datacenter lease structures, construction risk allocation, and financing arrangements (and how they will interact)
- Experience with EPC, AIA, and design-build arrangements at scale
- Comfort with project finance structures and the interplay between lease, financing, and development agreements
- Ability to coordinate effectively with specialized outside counsel while maintaining strategic direction
- Strong judgement about when deal terms create downstream risk for operational flexibility
- Effective collaboration skills for working with business teams who handle transaction management and site selection
- Genuine interest in infrastructure development and appreciation for why compute and datacenter capacity is mission-critical for frontier AI
Strong candidates may also have:
- In-house experience at cloud service providers, neo-clouds, datacenter developers supporting leasing, project development, and financing transactions
- Experience at large technology companies with datacenter construction programs supporting development transactions from the buy side
- Law firm experience at practices with infrastructure finance or project development specialization, particularly those who have worked on datacenter, power, or similar infrastructure financings
- Prior involvement in transactions requiring sophisticated understanding of custom hardware development, global supply chain and logistics, construction timelines, commissioning requirements, and operational handoff
- Familiarity with tax structures, sale lease-back arrangements, or other financing vehicles used in large-scale infrastructure development
Role-specific policy: For this role, we expect all staff to be able to work from our San Francisco, Seattle or New York office at least 3 days a week, though we encourage you to apply even if you might need some flexibility for an interim period of time.
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.
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 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