People Program Manager

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.

Anthropic is seeking a People Program Manager to join our People PMO team - a nimble team of organizational architects who take the company's most pressing people and culture challenges from 0 to 1. As Anthropic scales past 2,000 employees with ambitious growth ahead, we need builders who can prototype, validate, and operationalize foundational systems that enable the company to grow efficiently while preserving what makes us special.

In this role, you'll serve as a strategic generalist deployed on 3-6 month engagements to build critical organizational capabilities from scratch working on high-impact, high visibility projects. This is a strategic consulting role embedded within People, where you'll need to think like a management consultant, execute like a program manager, and understand people and culture deeply enough to build solutions that actually work within Anthropic's unique culture.

Responsibilities:

Strategic Problem-Solving & Design

• Conduct discovery work including stakeholder mapping, requirements gathering, and current state assessment to deeply understand problems before designing solutions
• Design innovative solutions and pilot approaches that balance speed with sustainability, using systems thinking to ensure interventions address root causes
• Define clear success metrics and transition criteria for each engagement before work begins

0-to-1 Program Building

• Lead strategic initiatives from problem defining through pilot to handoff, spanning 1-6 months each
• Rapidly prototype and iterate based on feedback, embracing the messy middle of building something new
• Create comprehensive documentation, playbooks, and training materials that enable permanent owners to sustain the work

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Stakeholder Management

• Navigate complex organizational dynamics to build buy-in for new approaches across multiple stakeholder groups
• Serve as a trusted advisor to cross-functional partners helping them think through people implications of business decisions
• Manage up, down, and across effectively - from influencing leaders to coordinating with individual contributors

Seamless Transition & Knowledge Transfer

• Identify and onboard permanent owners for programs you've built, ensuring they have the context and capability to succeed
• Establish ongoing governance, metrics, and support models that set up your work for long-term success
• Conduct postmortems to extract learnings and continuously improve the People PMO approach
• Celebrate successful handoffs as wins, not losses - your job is to build yourself out of work

Company Operating Rhythms (25% of role)

• Support execution of key people processes like Monthly Business Reviews and People team Planning
• Ensure these foundational rhythms run smoothly so the organization can focus on its mission
• Look for opportunities to improve these processes, but recognize this isn't the primary 0-to-1 building work

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 4-6 years of experience in program/project management, strategy, or chief of staff roles in fast-growing organizations, particularly on People teams
• Demonstrate exceptional systems thinking; you see connections between disparate pieces and design holistic solutions rather than point fixes
• Understand that standard playbooks often don't apply at Anthropic; you must be willing to adapt frameworks to our unique context, experiment with new approaches, and iterate quickly when traditional solutions don't fit
• Show strong program/project management skills with ability to manage multiple workstreams, drive clarity from ambiguity, and deliver on aggressive timelines
• Possess excellent written and verbal communication skills, including ability to create compelling narratives for executive audiences
• Have a proven ability to influence without authority and build credibility quickly with senior stakeholders
• Exhibit comfort with ambiguity and rapid context-switching - you thrive when the path isn't clear yet
• Show genuine curiosity about organizational design, people systems, and what makes companies work at scale

Strong candidates may also have:

• Experience at high-growth technology companies, particularly in the 500-4000 employee range
• Track record of building new programs or capabilities from scratch, particularly in ambiguous environments
• Understanding of frontier technology or AI (not required, but helpful for context)
• Demonstrated ability to zoom between strategic thinking and tactical execution
• Experience with change management initiatives at scale
• Background in management consulting or internal strategy roles
• Knowledge of organizational psychology or industrial/organizational psychology

What makes this role unique at Anthropic

This is an opportunity to work on some of the most strategic and high-visibility people challenges facing a frontier AI company during hyper-growth. You'll have extraordinary variety and learning opportunities, taking on completely new domains every few months and rapidly building expertise across the entire people and organizational landscape.

You'll own entire initiatives end-to-end with significant autonomy - we trust you to figure out the right approach, not follow a prescribed playbook. The role offers a unique vantage point across the entire organization, working with a variety of stakeholders and seeing how different parts of Anthropic connect. Your work directly enables Anthropic to scale effectively while maintaining our values and culture, ultimately helping ensure the world safely navigates the transition through transformative AI.

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.

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