Director Operational Excellence Jobs in San Francisco, CA

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 highly organized, analytically grounded Sales Strategy, Operational Excellence partner to help run the operating system of our go-to-market organization. As Anthropic's GTM motion scales rapidly, the difference between a sales org that grows and one that grows well comes down to operating discipline: a forecast call that runs the same way every week, a planning cycle where every team knows the timeline before it starts, and a single set of standards that Sales and Strategy both recognize as their own. You will sit at the center of the CCO's operating rhythm and act as the connective tissue between Sales leadership, Revenue Operations, Finance, and Systems. Week to week, that means making sure the forecast and pipeline cadences run cleanly and that the inputs leaders are looking at are consistent and trusted. Quarter to quarter, it means driving the mechanics of target setting and quota deployment. Annually, it means program-managing the planning cycle so that territories, capacity, comp, and targets land on time and tie together. The ideal candidate is someone who finds genuine satisfaction in making a complex organization run smoothly. You can take a process that exists as tribal knowledge across five spreadsheets and three Slack channels and turn it into a single, documented standard that people actually follow. You are comfortable being the person in the room who knows what's due, from whom, by when, and you can hold cross-functional partners accountable without authority. In a business where the model is evolving faster than the playbook, the ability to build durable operating mechanisms is itself a strategic asset.

Responsibilities

Run the CCO operating rhythm:

- Support the weekly forecasting and pipeline review cadence for the CCO and Sales leadership: prepare the inputs, run the mechanics, capture actions, and make sure follow-ups close
- Own the calendar, templates, and pre-read standards for recurring operating reviews (forecast, pipeline, QBRs) so leaders spend their time on decisions, not logistics
- Track commitments and risks coming out of operating reviews and drive them to resolution between meetings

Unify operating standards across Sales and Strategy:

- Establish and maintain a single set of operating standards, definitions, tools, and best practices across the Sales and Strategy organization so that teams are running the same plays the same way
- Document core processes (forecasting methodology, pipeline hygiene, deal stage criteria, rules of engagement) and drive adoption through enablement and reinforcement, not just publication
- Identify where teams have diverged in process or tooling, understand why, and bring them back to a common standard without breaking what's working locally

Drive planning, targets, and quota:

- Act as the program management backbone for annual and in-year planning: standardize timelines, templates, and tooling; serve as the central DRI for data aggregation; and be the primary point of contact for cross-functional partners like Systems, Finance, and HR
- Support target setting across the broader GTM organization, building the models and managing the process that translates the company plan into segment, region, and team-level numbers
- Support comp plan design and quota setting: partner with Sales leadership, Finance, and Total Rewards on plan mechanics, manage the quota allocation and deployment process, and ensure quotas reconcile to plan
- Support territory and capacity planning by maintaining the headcount-to-coverage view and flagging gaps before they become attainment problems

Build for scale:

- Design processes that hold up as the organization triples; what works as a spreadsheet today should have a clear path to a system tomorrow
- Build the templates, runbooks, and documentation so operating quality doesn't depend on any single person being in the loop
- Partner with Systems and Analytics to move repeatable manual work into tooling, and use Claude to accelerate documentation, data aggregation, and process design

You May Be a Good Fit If You

- Have 7+ years in sales operations, sales strategy, revenue operations, business operations, or a similar function, with direct experience supporting the operating cadence of a sales organization
- Have run or materially supported core GTM planning processes end to end: annual planning, target setting, quota allocation, territory design, or comp plan rollout
- Are an exceptional program manager; you can take a loosely defined cross-functional effort, put a plan around it, and drive it to a deadline across teams you don't control
- Understand the rhythm of a sales org from the inside: what a forecast call is for, what "commit" means, why pipeline coverage matters, and what makes a quota feel fair or unfair to a rep
- Are highly structured and detail-oriented without being rigid; you build the standard, but you know when the standard needs to bend
- Communicate clearly and concisely up, down, and across; you can write the one-page pre-read that lets a leadership meeting start at the decision instead of the context
- Are fluent in Excel/Sheets (modeling, lookups, structured data) and comfortable working in Salesforce; SQL or Looker experience is a plus but not required
- Are energized by bringing order to ambiguity and have a low ego about doing the unglamorous work that makes an organization run

Strong Candidates May Also Have

- Experience with sales compensation design (SPIFs, accelerators, plan mechanics) and the downstream operational realities of administering them
- Exposure to consumption-based or usage-based revenue models where forecasting and quota design don't follow the standard SaaS pattern
- Familiarity with planning and territory tools (Anaplan, Pigment, Fullcast, or similar)
- A track record of using AI tools to accelerate operational and program management work

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below. For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary

$270,000—$310,000 USD

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.