Head of Partner Success

About the role

Consulting and systems integration firms are racing to build Claude practices. Far more firms have applied to our partner program than any team could ever hand-manage. A focused fraction of them will become great — the kind of partner whose architects deliver Claude work customers love, who specializes deeply enough to be the obvious choice in their lane, whose joint customer book grows year over year. The Partner Success team picks those partners and makes them great. We're hiring its first leader.

You will build Partner Success at Anthropic from scratch. That means hiring your first partner success managers, defining how they run their portfolios, and personally carrying a portfolio of partners yourself as your reference implementation. You'll be the standard for what good looks like before you ask anyone else to do it.

You will also define which partners get the team's attention. Far more firms want to be a managed partner than your team could ever serve, and choosing the right ones is one of the most consequential decisions in this role. What makes a partner worth investing in. What makes one ready to graduate in or out. How the team is organized as the portfolio grows — by industry, by region, by partner type, or some combination that doesn't exist yet — these are decisions you make once you're in seat. We have opinions but we don't have answers, and we want a leader who is energized by figuring them out.

The partner side of frontier AI has not been figured out yet. There is no playbook to inherit. You will be co-defining what good Claude work looks like across thousands of customer engagements, and the playbook your team writes will set the standard for how an entire industry of consulting firms learns to deploy frontier AI for their customers. Anthropic moves fast and the product changes under the partner's feet. Your team keeps the partners current and aligned without slowing down the practice investments those partners are making in us.

Responsibilities:

• Build and lead the Partner Success team from scratch. Hire your first partner success managers, define how they run their portfolios, and build the operating system the team inherits.
• Personally carry a portfolio of managed partners as your reference implementation. Be the standard for what good looks like before asking anyone else to do it.
• Decide which partners get the team's attention. Design the criteria for entry into and graduation from the managed portfolio, and reshape it as the data comes in.
• Design the team's engagement model. Define when proactive engagement is warranted, when reactive engagement is triggered by clear signals, and when partners are better served by routing, programmatic enablement, and the certified bench.
• Run the joint planning and business review cadence with each managed partner. Quarterly business reviews with alliance and practice leads. Joint goal-setting on customer adoption, certified architects, references, and industry positioning.
• Drive scalable enablement across the managed partner book. Make sure partner architects are trained on new Claude capabilities as they ship, the partner's offerings reflect what Claude can now do, and the partner's bench is positioned to apply new features in their customer work at scale.
• Drive adoption, retention, and expansion in the joint customer book. Track the health of the customer accounts each partner is serving on Claude, 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 each partner to commit to one or more industry lanes and hold them to building real bench depth and published reference work in those lanes.
• Steward co-investment funding decisions. Own the calls on where Anthropic puts co-investment dollars to back specific partner-led customer engagements. The bar is outcomes, not consultant hours.
• Interlock with Anthropic's direct sales field and with the alliances organization that owns the executive relationship with each strategic partner. Define the handoffs in writing, train both sides, and hold the line.
• Define the team's regional coverage model as the portfolio grows and hire accordingly.
• Instrument the managed partner portfolio. Consumption growth by partner, sourced and influenced pipeline, time-to-first-deal, adoption-retention-expansion trends, and partner health trajectory.

You may be a good fit if you have:

• Six to ten years of experience working with consulting and systems integration partners at a software company, cloud platform, or partner-led business, with at least two of those years managing a team.
• Built or scaled a partner-facing team from scratch before — hiring, onboarding, methodology creation — not just managed an existing team.
• Deep understanding of how partner success works in a usage-based business. You have held a number tied to customer behavior (adoption, retention, expansion) rather than contract signature.
• Strong commercial instincts on partner selection and co-investment funding. You can tell which partners are worth investing in and which look impressive on paper but will not ship customer outcomes.
• Experience running scalable partner or practitioner enablement, or the hunger to learn it. You understand the difference between a training program that gets attendance and one that changes what practitioners do in customer engagements the next week.
• Enough technical fluency to be credible in an architecture review. You do not need to write code, but you can follow the conversation and ask the second question when a partner architect walks through how they are using Claude on a real customer problem.
• Comfortable sharing the partner relationship with a separate alliances team that owns the executive conversation. You can work closely with them, weekly, without ego friction.
• Use Claude or another large language model in your own daily work — not as a chat tool, but as part of how you prepare for partner reviews, draft account plans, analyze pipeline, and coach your team. We will ask you to walk us through a recent deliverable.

Strong candidates may also have:

• Direct experience with global systems integrators such as Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, Infosys, TCS, or Wipro, and an understanding of how their delivery practices are built.
• Working at a company in transition from product-led to partner-led motion.
• Stewarding co-investment funding at scale and forming opinions about what works and what does not.
• Building a vertical industry motion in which partners specialized by industry and the program rewarded it.
• Designing an engagement model for a small team covering a large ecosystem — the proactive-reactive-automated split that lets a handful of people serve thousands of relationships.