Federal Affairs 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.

About the role

We are looking for a Federal Affairs Manager who will lead Anthropic's federal procurement policy, appropriations and authorization strategy with policymakers, working to secure federal resources and legislative authority for AI initiatives that advance our mission of ensuring that artificial intelligence systems are developed safely and benefit the American public.

In this role, you will work closely with Anthropic's policy team to develop and execute appropriations and procurement strategies across the full range of defense and civilian government spending—identifying procurement policy opportunities, translating policy priorities into legislative language, building relationships with executive branch officials, appropriations committee staff and members, and securing resources that enable federal agencies to leverage AI for positive outcomes across defense, intelligence, research, and other national  interests.

Anthropic is equal parts research lab, policy think-tank, and technology startup. We care deeply about safe development of AI systems, and build partnership with governments through proactive, opinionated, substantive policy conversations. This is a unique opportunity to shape how AI policy and governance develop at a critical moment in the technology's trajectory.

In this role, you will:

• Develop and execute appropriations, authorization, and procurement policy strategy in partnership with Anthropic's policy and government relations leadership, identifying funding and authority gaps and opportunities across federal agencies
• Build and maintain substantive relationships with Appropriations Committee staff (House and Senate), Armed Services Committee staff (House and Senate), relevant member offices, and key agency contacts; conduct regular strategy and intelligence gathering to inform Anthropic's priorities
• Translate Anthropic's policy objectives and strategic priorities into specific appropriations, authorization, and procurement requests; develop legislative language and position papers that articulate the case for funding and authority
• Coordinate across Anthropic's policy team, sales team, public sector team, and agency points of contact to align appropriations, authorization, and procurement policy strategies with agency needs and constraints
• Analyze the appropriations process, including committee dynamics, subcommittee priorities, and legislative calendars; advise on timing, strategy, and feasibility of specific requests
• Manage the annual appropriations and authorization cycles, regular appropriations bills, and supplemental opportunities; track legislative developments and adjust strategy accordingly
• Manage the annual NDAA cycle; track developments and adjust strategy accordingly
• Monitor procurement policy developments and identify opportunities to influence government adoption and utilization of AI
• Serve as the primary point of contact for internal stakeholders on appropriations-related questions, opportunities, and developments; communicate progress and strategy regularly to leadership

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 8+ years of experience in federal appropriations, procurement, and authorization, with strong preference for having worked on an appropriations committee (House or Senate) or for a member of an appropriations committee, or on an armed services committee (House or Senate) or for a member of these committees.
• Have demonstrated expertise in legislative, appropriations, and procurement processes. You understand how committees work, how language gets included in bills, the timing and dynamics of the annual appropriations cycle, and how to navigate procedural opportunities
• Have a track record of securing legislative and executive branch wins through appropriations language or authorization provisions; you can point to specific funding streams, authorities, or provisions you helped establish
• Understand the defense, national security, and intelligence procurement and appropriations landscape; you have relationships in this community and understand agency priorities and constraints
• Can work effectively across multiple substantive domains without being a deep expert in each; you excel at translation between technical/policy teams and the appropriations, authorization, and procurement processes
• Thrive in fast-moving, relationship-driven environments where you need to build and maintain trust with congressional staff and members; you are a serious, credible presence in those conversations
• Have intellectual curiosity about how AI can be deployed to advance government priorities; you can speak credibly and substantively about technology and policy 
• Excel at translating complex policy priorities into clear, actionable, legislative-ready recommendations
• Are comfortable working as part of a team with deep substantive experts and policy strategists; bringing process and relationships expertise
• Are based in or willing to relocate to Washington DC

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. 

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