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.
Anthropic is seeking a senior M&A People Program Manager to own the People side of our M&A program end-to-end. The People PMO is a nimble team of organizational architects who take the company's most pressing people and culture challenges from 0 to 1 and we need a senior operator who doesn't just run deals but also defines how this company does the People side of M&A.
In this role, you'll act as Corporate Development's strategic counterpart on all things People: shaping deal decisions (structure, timing, retention strategy, people cost) from the earliest stages, leading the most complex acquisitions yourself, and setting the direction, standards, and playbooks for all People-side M&A work. You’ll be the second member of the team coordinating across Recruiting, People Partners, People Operations, Workplace, Immigration, Employment Legal, and Internal Comms, and you'll build the durable program infrastructure that makes each deal go more smoothly than the last. This is a role for someone who can operate on year-long horizons with minimal direction, drop into deal-level detail when timelines compress, and represent Anthropic credibly in rooms where the deal is on the line.
Program ownership & strategy
- Own the People-side M&A program end-to-end: strategy, operating model, standards, and outcomes across all deals, from earliest deal discussions through 90-day integration and retro.
- Act as Corp Dev's strategic counterpart on People matters: Inform deal structure, timelines, retention strategy, entity decisions, and people-cost implications early enough to shape outcomes, not just react to them
- Set the long term direction for the program: where we invest in infrastructure, what we standardize, and how the function should evolve.
Leading the most complex deals
- Serve as the People-side DRI for our largest and most complex acquisitions — multi-entity or international deals, larger teams, concurrent transactions, and situations with significant retention or sentiment risk
- Sequence interdependent workstreams (immigration, offers, entity setup, onboarding, benefits, internal comms) correctly under compressed timelines, and keep the acquiree experience strong even when plans change
- Anticipate downstream risk from upstream deal decisions and raise flags early — with options and trade-offs, not just problems
Direction-setting and quality across the program
- Set the standards, templates, and decision frameworks that all People-side M&A work follows, in partnership with the existing team.
- Build credibility and operating rhythms with senior stakeholders across Corp Dev, Legal, Finance, and People so the right people mobilize quickly when timelines compress
- Level up the broader People team's ability to execute M&A confidently through documentation, retros, and coaching-by-doing
Systems & program infrastructure
- Build the infrastructure that doesn't exist yet — intake processes, diligence checklists, integration tracking, retention frameworks, post-close retros — and make it durable enough that it scales beyond your personal involvement
- Identify recurring failure modes across deals and implement upstream fixes; institutionalize learnings so the playbook genuinely improves with every transaction
- Use Claude and automation thoughtfully to scale the program (tracking, drafting, checklist generation) so the team's capacity grows faster than headcount
- Experience across program management, HR/People operations, and M&A integration, including direct ownership of People workstreams across multiple transactions — not just participation in one
- Have operated as a true partner to Corp Dev or a deal team: you've influenced deal structure, timing, or retention decisions, not only executed the People plan that followed them
- Can hold a portfolio of work — multiple deals, multiple workstreams per deal — and sequence interdependencies correctly (immigration before offers; entity verification before onboarding) without letting details drop
- Know how to set direction and standards for work you don't personally execute, and keep the bar high with people who don't report to you
- Are exceptionally organized and calm under pressure, and communicate clearly and directly when timelines are tight or information is incomplete
- Build programs and systems that outlast you — playbooks, frameworks, and processes that others adopt and run without you in the room
- Are comfortable operating with minimal oversight on long horizons, creating your own structure and clarity for others where none exists
- 10+ years across M&A integration, program management, and/or HR/People operations, with ownership and scope that has grown deal over deal.
- Stood up an M&A People integration function or playbook from scratch at a fast-growing technology company
- Led People integration for international or multi-entity acquisitions, including immigration, employment legal, and entity-setup coordination
- Managed several concurrent transactions, or a deal pipeline, rather than a single deal at a time
- Experience guiding or mentoring other program managers, or leading pods/working teams without formal management authority
- Worked closely enough with Corp Dev to be trusted in target-facing conversations (management meetings, retention discussions, close-day communications)
This is a chance to define how a frontier AI company does the People side of M&A during hyper-growth. You'll operate with significant autonomy on the most strategic, highest-complexity people challenges we face, with a direct line to Corp Dev and senior People leadership and a vantage point across the entire organization. Your work determines whether the people who join us through acquisitions land well, stay, and do their best work here, which directly shapes Anthropic's ability to scale safely and maintain its culture through transformative AI.
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.
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.
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.
