Commercial Counsel, Networking & Datacenter Operations

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

As Commercial Counsel, Networking & Datacenter Operations for Compute and Infrastructure at Anthropic, you’ll lead legal execution for the connective tissue and the steady-state running of Anthropic’s Infrastructure. This role spans dark fiber and IRU agreements, IP transit and peering, subsea-cable capacity, network-equipment procurement, and the Operations & Maintenance (O&M), facilities-management, commissioning, decommissioning, and resilience contracting that keeps production sites online once the keys are handed over.

You’ll work in close partnership with Anthropic teammates in Datacenter Legal, Strategic Technology & Procurement, Infrastructure Security, Treasury/Risk and Public Policy, in addition to specialized outside counsel. You will serve as the primary legal owner ensuring external work product aligns with Anthropic’s commercial objectives and integrates with our overall compute and availability strategy.

Responsibilities:

• Negotiate dark fiber and IRU agreements (long-haul and metro), wavelength and lit-capacity services, IP transit and peering (settlement-free and paid), internet-exchange participation, subsea-cable capacity and landing-party agreements, carrier-hotel and meet-me-room agreements, and cross-connect MSAs

• Support the telecom regulatory interface, including FCC Section 214 authorizations, submarine-cable landing licenses and Team Telecom (EO 13913 Committee) review, the FCC’s 2025 subsea-cable security and IRU rules, private-carrier status determinations, and rights-of-way, franchise, and pole-attachment where Anthropic builds first-party fiber — working in close coordination with Infrastructure Security Legal on the national-security overlay for subsea capacity and landing-party participation

• Structure and negotiate O&M and integrated-facilities-management contracts, critical-spares and break-fix agreements, smart-hands SLAs with colo landlords, and disaster recovery and resilience contracting

• Own asset disposition, decommissioning, and media-sanitization terms, and data-hall fit-out and tenant-improvement work, in coordination with Infrastructure Security and Datacenter Legal

• Support property, builder’s-risk, business-interruption, and equipment-breakdown insurance placement with Treasury/Risk, and coordinate with Infrastructure Security Legal on guard-force, vendor-personnel, and physical-security flow-downs in O&M and facilities-management contracts

• Work closely with specialized outside counsel, ensuring their work product aligns with Anthropic’s commercial objectives

• Build and own the network and O&M contract template library, SLA-credit playbooks, and intake and approval workflows so Network and Site-Ops teams can self-serve standard transactions; train Procurement and operations partners to apply them at scale

• Manage SLA-credit claims, outage and root-cause-related disputes, warranty and break-fix claims, and pre-litigation vendor escalations, in coordination with Litigation

• Collaborate with the Compute team’s production-site and network-operations leads who handle operational execution, change management, and governance, providing legal and risk management expertise

• Understand how networking and operations legal structures interact with the compute capacity they support — availability SLAs, route diversity, and maintenance windows

• Escalate novel structures or terms that create downstream risk for Anthropic’s availability or operational flexibility; ensure vendor arrangements accommodate AI-specific requirements including high-density power, liquid cooling infrastructure, and rapid scaling capacity

Minimum qualifications:

• JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar

• Fluency in availability and SLA constructs, route diversity and how network and O&M terms interact with colo leases, build-to-suit agreements, and financing arrangements

• Experience with high-volume, template-driven, recurring vendor contracting and the discipline to keep it fast without losing control of risk

• Comfort with telecom regulatory concepts (FCC Section 214, cable-landing licenses, Team Telecom review, rights-of-way) and the operational hand-off from construction to commissioning to steady-state

• Ability to coordinate effectively with specialized outside counsel while maintaining strategic direction

• Strong judgment about when vendor terms create downstream risk for availability, security, or operational flexibility

• Effective collaboration skills for working with business teams who run production sites and the network and excellent communication skills that translate network and operations concepts into clear risk assessments for business stakeholders

• Genuine interest in digital infrastructure operations and appreciation for why network and site availability is mission-critical for frontier AI

Preferred qualifications:

• At least 10–12 years of relevant legal experience with meaningful exposure to telecom and network transactions (dark fiber, IRUs, transit, peering, subsea), datacenter operations, facilities management, or critical-infrastructure O&M contracting

• In-house experience at cloud service providers, neo-clouds, carriers, subsea-cable consortia, or datacenter operators supporting network, colo, and O&M transactions

• Experience at large technology companies with first-party backbone or production-site programs supporting network and operations transactions from the buy side

• Law firm experience at practices with telecom, technology transactions, or infrastructure specialization, particularly those who have worked on fiber, peering, subsea, or datacenter operations matters

• Prior involvement in transactions requiring sophisticated understanding of commissioning requirements, operational handoff, change management, and decommissioning

• Familiarity with insurance and risk-transfer structures used in large-scale operating infrastructure, and with international vendor contracting for non-US production sites

Role-specific policy: For this role, we expect staff to be able to work from our San Francisco, Seattle, Washington D.C., 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.

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