Life Sciences Operator, Lead

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

As part of our growing investment in building capabilities for drug discovery and development, we're looking for an exceptional biotech operator to help accelerate research in these areas. Our north star is to speed up progress in drug development by an order of magnitude, and this role is central to that goal: bringing sharp scientific judgment and operational expertise to identify where AI can have the greatest impact, and the drive to turn those insights into real results.

This role is for an entrepreneurial operator with proven hands-on experience generating and translating therapeutic hypotheses in a biotech setting. You should be self-directed and multi-disciplinary - equally comfortable shaping the strategic direction of our life sciences work, partnering closely with our research, product, and go-to-market teams, or working hands-on with Claude, including tools like Claude Science, to explore hypotheses, design and analyze research, and demonstrate what's newly possible for scientists.

The ideal candidate has grown up professionally in an organization that prioritizes scientific and executional rigor— for example, at a high-growth life sciences company or a leading science-focused investment or venture firm — and brings a rare blend of scientific depth, operating ability, and biotech fluency.

Key responsibilities

• Identify and prioritize the areas where AI can most meaningfully accelerate life sciences research
• Turn promising scientific ideas into concrete, well-scoped efforts and see them through with speed and ownership
• Translate ambiguous scientific questions into structured, testable plans with clear milestones
• Work hands-on with Claude and Claude Science to explore hypotheses, design and analyze research, and show what's newly possible
• Partner across research, product, and go-to-market to shape strategy and bring scientific work to life
• Serve as a trusted scientific voice, communicating clearly with both technical and business audiences

Minimum qualifications

• A strong scientific and operating background with direct experience taking ideas from concept to results in a company setting; MD/PhD not required
• Have grown up professionally in a multidisciplinary role at a high-growth life sciences company or a leading science-focused investment or venture firm
• Previously founded or joined as a founding team member of a biotechnology startup
• Excellent scientific taste and entrepreneurial instinct — a track record of identifying and capitalizing on compelling opportunities before they are obvious
• The wherewithal to execute independently; you are senior enough to have real judgment, but hands-on enough to build things yourself
• A unique blend of scientific and business literacy, and are comfortable moving fluidly between the two

Preferred qualifications

• 7+ years of direct experience taking ideas from concept to results in a company setting
• Comfort navigating ambiguity and building in a fast-moving, frontier environment

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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. <strong>Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage:</strong> Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.

How to apply

The compensation for this role is described in the posting and includes base salary and potential bonuses as described in the listing.

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