Legal Director 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 an exceptional senior People Legal Counsel who will closely partner with our People team, business and technical stakeholders to build and manage employment programs that enable high performers to achieve their best work. This role will take team-level ownership beyond individual projects, efficiently solving complex legal problems with strategic direction from leadership, and will amplify others' impact through collaboration and mentorship. The ideal candidate pairs deep law firm and in-house experience at an international company, with the ability to develop scalable frameworks and processes, and collaborate effectively across technical and business teams in a fast-paced and fun environment.

Key Responsibilities

- Partner with Legal, People, and Finance teams on global M&A deals
- Advise the People team and managers on a wide range of legal matters including compensation, benefits, performance management, leaves of absence, and co-employment issues
- Implement and manage compliant employment programs to create a culture of high performance, and alignment to Anthropic's culture, values, and People philosophy
- Craft clear and comprehensive written guidance, policies, playbooks, and communications that effectively translate complex international employment law concepts into actionable frameworks for technical and business stakeholders
- Proactively identify and mitigate employment legal risks
- Amplify the team: coach and mentor key partners, managers, and cross-functional stakeholders, building employment law fluency across the organization
- Support on demands, charges, and litigation; liaise and manage relationships with outside counsel
- Stay current on relevant employment laws, regulations, and industry trends, and proactively disseminate implications to key stakeholders

Minimum Qualifications

- Have a JD from an accredited law school and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar (California, New York, or Washington preferred)
- Have demonstrated team-level ownership — you've independently owned a practice area or major workstream and built systems and frameworks others rely on
- Are humble, thoughtful, exercise sound judgment, and operate at the highest level of integrity
- Are strategic, flexible, resourceful, and solution-oriented — you anticipate problems and build for scale
- Have strong organizational and project management skills, and can drive complex multi-stakeholder workstreams with minimal oversight
- Have exceptional analytical, writing, and communication skills — you define strategy and translate complex legal issues into actionable guidance for non-lawyers and executives alike
- Are a generous collaborator who amplifies others' effectiveness
- Are curious, open, and willing to change your mind
- Are comfortable in a fast-paced, high-volume, ambiguous environment

Preferred Qualifications

- Have at least 10 years of practicing employment law, with a combination of experience at a global-focused law firm and in-house
- Experience advising on employment legal matters across multiple jurisdictions
- Experience in a high-growth tech company or similarly fast-paced in-house environment
- A track record of building employment legal programs or playbooks that scaled with company growth

Role-specific policy:

For this role, we expect all staff to be able to work from our San Francisco 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. 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

$335,000—$385,000 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.