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.

About the Role:

Anthropic is seeking a Senior 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 2,500+ employees with ambitious growth ahead, we need experienced 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 leader deployed on high-complexity, multi-month engagements to build critical organizational capabilities from scratch. You'll own entire portfolios of interconnected initiatives, define the vision and strategy for your program areas, and coach others through ambiguous challenges. This is a strategic consulting role embedded within People, where you'll think like a management consultant, execute like a seasoned program manager, and understand people and culture deeply enough to build solutions that actually work within Anthropic's unique environment.

Responsibilities:

Strategic Problem-Solving & Design

• Define the vision and strategic approach for complex, multi-faceted organizational challenges, translating ambiguous executive priorities into actionable program roadmaps

• Conduct comprehensive discovery work including stakeholder mapping, requirements gathering, and current state assessment—often synthesizing across multiple interconnected problem spaces

• Design innovative solutions that address root causes across systems, balancing speed with sustainability and anticipating second-order effects

• Define clear success metrics, risk mitigation strategies, and transition criteria that set programs up for long-term success

0-to-1 Program Building

• Lead strategic initiatives from problem definition through pilot to handoff, managing multiple concurrent workstreams spanning 3-6+ months each

• Make tough prioritization decisions across competing demands, ensuring the highest-impact work moves forward

• Navigate complex technical and organizational challenges with minimal senior direction, knowing when to escalate and when to drive forward independently

• Create comprehensive documentation, playbooks, and training materials that enable permanent owners to sustain and evolve the work

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Stakeholder Management

• Navigate complex organizational dynamics to build buy-in for new approaches across multiple senior stakeholder groups

• Serve as a trusted advisor and coach to cross-functional partners, helping them think through people implications of business decisions and develop their own capabilities

• Delegate effectively to team members and cross-functional contributors while maintaining accountability for outcomes

• Provide direct, helpful feedback that elevates the work of those around you; model excellence in difficult conversations

Seamless Transition & Knowledge Transfer

• Identify and develop permanent owners for programs you've built, coaching them to take full ownership

• Establish governance structures, metrics frameworks, and support models that ensure programs thrive beyond your involvement

• Extract learnings and codify best practices that improve the People PMO's approach and benefit future initiatives

• Celebrate successful handoffs as wins—your job is to build yourself out of work and leave programs stronger than you found them

Company Operating Rhythms (25% of role)

• Support execution of key people processes like Monthly Business Reviews and People team planning

• Identify systemic improvements to these foundational rhythms, implementing changes that create lasting efficiency gains

• Ensure these rhythms run smoothly so the organization can focus on its mission

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 6-9 years of experience in program/project management, strategy, chief of staff, or internal consulting roles, with significant experience in fast-growing technology companies, particularly on People/HR teams

• Demonstrate exceptional systems thinking; you see connections between disparate pieces, anticipate downstream effects, and design holistic solutions that work across organizational boundaries

• Have a track record of owning and driving multiple complex workstreams simultaneously, making tough prioritization calls without extensive guidance

• Show proven ability to define strategy and vision for program areas, not just execute against others' plans

• Possess excellent written and verbal communication skills, including ability to create compelling narratives for executive audiences and influence strategic direction

• Have demonstrated success influencing without authority and building credibility quickly with senior stakeholders across multiple functions

• Exhibit strong comfort with ambiguity and rapid context-switching—you thrive when the path isn't clear and can create clarity for others

• Show genuine curiosity about organizational design, people systems, and what makes companies work at scale

• Understand that standard playbooks often don't apply at Anthropic; you adapt frameworks to unique contexts, experiment with new approaches, and iterate quickly when traditional solutions don't fit

Strong candidates may also have:

• Experience at high-growth technology companies in the 500-5000 employee range, particularly during periods of significant organizational scaling

• Track record of building multiple new programs or capabilities from scratch in ambiguous environments, with evidence they've thrived after handoff

• Experience coaching or developing other program managers or cross-functional contributors

• Understanding of frontier technology or AI (helpful for context, not required)

• Background in management consulting (e.g., MBB, Big 4 strategy) or internal strategy/transformation roles

• Experience with large-scale change management initiatives

• Knowledge of organizational psychology, organizational design, or industrial/organizational psychology

• Experience working directly with executive leadership on strategic initiatives

What makes this role unique at Anthropic

This is an opportunity to work on the most strategic, high-complexity 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 define the vision and strategy for your program areas with significant autonomy—we trust you to figure out the right approach, make tough calls, and create clarity for others. The role offers a unique vantage point across the entire organization, partnering with senior leaders across functions 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