Operations Lead 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 Team

Anthropic's Life Sciences team is building a world-class research group focused on making fundamental biological discoveries. The team combines cutting-edge AI with hands-on biological research, positioning Anthropic at the forefront of AI-accelerated scientific discovery.

About The Role

We are hiring a Research Operations Lead to be the operational backbone of our team: the person who makes sure scientists can walk in every morning and get straight to science. You'll take on the operational systems we've started — procurement, inventory, safety, equipment, space — make them better, and scale them as the lab and its needs grow. We're hiring for trajectory as much as for what you've already done: the scope of this role will grow with the size of the team, and we want someone who's excited by that. This role is a rare opportunity to build the operational foundation of Anthropic's biology team and to grow with it. The systems you put in place will shape how a frontier AI company does experimental biology for years to come. If you're energized by high-ownership operational work in the service of ambitious science, we'd love to hear from you.

Responsibilities

- Own day-to-day operations end to end: ordering and inventory, equipment scheduling and upkeep, consumables, shipping and receiving, and general space organization
- Build on and extend the operational systems a growing group needs: procurement workflows, inventory and sample tracking, equipment maintenance and calibration schedules, onboarding and training, SOPs
- Manage facilities and space: coordinate buildouts, moves, and equipment installs; act as the primary interface to building management, contractors, and Anthropic's central Workplace and IT teams
- Own the operating budget: track spend against plan, run the capital equipment purchasing process, and partner with Finance on forecasting and reporting
- Manage vendor and supplier relationships: including contract research organizations: source and qualify vendors, negotiate quotes and service contracts, schedule preventive maintenance and field-service visits, and hold suppliers to their commitments

Minimum Qualifications

- Have managed the day-to-day operations of a life sciences lab — equipment, inventory, ordering, safety, space, and scheduling
- Have hands-on procurement and vendor management experience: sourcing suppliers, negotiating quotes and service contracts, and coordinating field-service and maintenance technicians
- Have tracked and managed an operating budget: purchase orders, invoices, spend-vs-plan, and capital requests

Preferred Qualifications

- Are the person everyone in your group already comes to when something is broken, missing, late, or unclear — and you like being that person
- Enjoy engaging with scientists on the science itself — you want to understand what's happening at the bench well enough to anticipate needs
- Are results-oriented and practical and pick up slack even when it goes outside your job description
- Enjoy a role that stretches from the hands-on to the strategic, and are comfortable when priorities shift quickly and feedback is direct
- Lab operations or lab management experience in a biotech, pharma, diagnostics, or life-sciences startup environment, including exposure to how those organizations build new functions and processes end to end
- A degree in the life sciences and prior research experience at the bench
- People-management experience: hiring, onboarding, and supervising operations or facilities staff
- Experience supporting a team through significant growth in headcount, footprint, or capability, including utilities, permitting, and equipment
- Familiarity with liquid-handling platforms, including their service, calibration, and consumable needs
- Experience selecting and administering inventory management, sample tracking, equipment scheduling, or ELN systems
- Capital equipment lifecycle management experience — evaluation, purchase, qualification (IQ/OQ/PQ), service contracts, and decommissioning
- Experience with regulated shipping and receiving of biological materials, including import/export, permits, and material transfer agreements
- Experience using AI tools for efficient team and process management (e.g., Claude Cowork)

Compensation

- Annual Salary: $150,000—$200,000 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.