Senior Variable Compensation 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:

We are seeking an experienced Senior Variable Compensation Manager to design, implement, and manage Anthropic's variable compensation programs. As our first dedicated variable compensation professional, you will shape how we incentivize and reward performance across our rapidly growing organization. This role will start as a senior individual contributor with the opportunity to build and lead a team as our compensation programs scale with organizational growth.

You'll partner closely with executive leadership, People Operations, Finance, and department heads to create compensation strategies that align individual and team performance with Anthropic's mission of building safe, beneficial AI systems. Your work will be instrumental in ensuring our compensation philosophy attracts top talent while driving the behaviors and outcomes critical to our success.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement comprehensive variable compensation strategies that align with Anthropic's business objectives, values, and growth trajectory
• Partner with executive leadership to gain alignment on plan design principles, structures, and payout methodologies
• Draft detailed compensation plan documents, communicate program changes, and ensure clear understanding across all stakeholders
• Lead the selection, implementation, and ongoing management of incentive compensation management systems and tools
• Collaborate with Finance to establish budgeting processes and expense forecasting models
• Work with People Operations to integrate variable compensation into broader total rewards strategy and performance management processes for GTM team members
• Analyze market trends and compensation data to ensure our programs remain competitive and effective
• Develop governance frameworks and approval processes for plan modifications and special circumstances
• Create reporting and analytics to measure program effectiveness and inform future design decisions
• Build scalable processes and documentation to support organizational growth and eventual team expansion

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 5+ years of experience in variable compensation design, administration, or related field, preferably in high-growth technology companies
• Have deep expertise in GTM incentive plan design principles, including sales compensation, executive incentives, and broad-based variable pay programs
• Are skilled at translating business strategy into actionable compensation frameworks that drive desired behaviors
• Have experience with incentive compensation management systems (such as CaptivateIQ, Xactly, or similar platforms)
• Excel at building relationships and influencing stakeholders at all levels, from individual contributors to executive leadership
• Are comfortable working in ambiguous, fast-paced environments and can bring structure to complex challenges
• Have strong analytical skills and experience with data analysis, financial modeling, and reporting
• Possess excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex compensation concepts clearly
• Are detail-oriented with strong project management skills and ability to manage multiple priorities simultaneously
• Care about ensuring that advanced AI systems are developed safely and are excited about contributing to our mission

Strong candidates may also have:

• Experience building variable compensation programs from the ground up in startup or scale-up environments
• Familiarity with international compensation considerations for global teams
• Experience leading and developing teams, with interest in building a variable compensation function over time
• Understanding of AI/technology industry compensation trends and practices

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. 

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.