Procurement Operations Business Partner, R&D Operations

About the role

Procurement Operations is the front door for buying at Anthropic. We sit inside Finance Operations and own the path from “I need to buy something” to a signed agreement, an accurate purchase order, and clean spend data at month-end.

We are hiring a Procurement Operations Business Partner to own that path for our research organizations and the special programs that spawn out of it. This portfolio behaves differently from the rest of the company in that it purchases goods and services from highly-specialized vendors and new programs regularly appear with real purchasing needs before any process exists for them. You will be the person who makes all of that feel simple to the researchers and program leads who depend on it, and reliable to the Finance stakeholders behind it. This is a high-volume role with an accounting core. You ensure every purchase in the portfolio is coded, dated, received, and accrued correctly, so research spend is right in the books every month. Expect a steady queue of requests, work orders, and change orders, and expect to be the person Accounting trusts on all of it.

We use Claude as part of our daily workflow and are looking for someone who wants to help define what an AI-native procurement operations function looks like, including how AI changes intake, document review, vendor coordination, and requester support.

Responsibilities

Own the purchasing path for R&D

• Manage a high volume of purchase requests, work orders, and change orders each month across research teams and programs, keeping speed and accuracy high at the same time.
• Serve as the primary procurement partner for Anthropic's research teams and special programs, guiding requesters from initial request to signed agreement and issued purchase order.
• Review every purchase request in your portfolio for the things that matter downstream: the right vendor record and contracting entity, complete commercial documents, correct spend categorization and service dates, and the approvals the purchase actually needs.
• Determine what each request requires before it can move, whether that is a statement of work, an order form, an amendment, a security or privacy review, or a third party risk assessment, and route it to the right reviewers the first time.
• Launch and track contract review with Legal, keep it moving, and confirm the executed agreement supports the purchase order before it is issued.
• Structure purchase orders so they match how the vendor bills (fixed fee, milestone, per-unit, or usage in arrears) and how Accounting needs to see the spend, with the right GL account, cost center, and service period on every line. Manage change orders, renewals, and closures over the life of each agreement.
• Act as the dedicated operations partner for our research services vendor portfolio, where engagements are structured as master agreements with frequent work orders and scope changes, and where speed and documentation discipline both matter.
• Handle the mechanics that come with hardware, equipment, and lab purchasing, including multi line quotes, lead times, shipping and receiving, and asset handoffs.

Financial completeness & accuracy

• Code every purchase order correctly at creation, including GL account, spend category, cost center, and service period, and understand how each choice lands in the financials (expense vs. prepaid, capitalized equipment vs. operating spend).
• Work the hard cases with Accounting: services that span periods, partially delivered milestones, per-unit work billed in arrears, credits and true-ups, and work orders amended mid-month.
• Own the open purchase order book: receipts recorded against actual delivery, periodic reviews, stale line cleanup, coding corrections, and timely closures, so PO, receipt, and invoice agree.
• Serve as the first line reviewer for month end accruals on your portfolio, gathering estimates from vendors and budget owners for variable spend and confirming or correcting proposed amounts so Accounting can close on time.
• Partner with Accounts Payable to resolve invoice holds, PO mismatches, and receiving questions so vendors are paid on time and spend lands where it belongs.
• Support audit and reporting requests that touch your portfolio, including commitment schedules and control evidence, with data you can stand behind.

Stand up new programs

• Be the first procurement call when a new research program or initiative spins up. Scope what they will buy and how often, agree a right sized path with Legal, Security, and Finance, and have it working before volume arrives.
• Run a regular pipeline check in with your highest velocity teams so upcoming purchases are visible early and nothing urgent arrives as a surprise.
• Translate procurement, legal, security, and finance requirements into plain language for researchers and engineers, and carry their operating reality back to those teams so controls fit the work.

Be the front door

• Be visible and responsive in your teams' Slack channels and office hours; answer routine purchasing questions quickly and escalate real blockers with context.
• Apply purchasing policy consistently and explain the why, including approval thresholds, signature authority, and when an exception is and is not available.

Continuous improvement

• Maintain the playbooks, intake guidance, and standard operating procedures for your portfolio so the path is repeatable and does not live in one person's head.
• Identify manual steps, repeat questions, and failure points and fix them, including where Claude and workflow automation with AI can take work off requesters and the team.

Minimum qualifications

• Proven track record of owning a high-volume purchasing portfolio end-to-end in procure-to-pay and intake platform.
• Solid working knowledge of accrual accounting as it applies to purchasing: accruals and reversals, service period and cutoff, prepaid vs. expense, and GL and cost center coding. You can explain how a purchase order becomes an entry in the general ledger.
• Experience supporting outsourced or managed service vendors at scale, where scope and volume move month to month and the contracts, purchase orders, and invoices have to keep up with each other.
• Working knowledge of how contract review, security and privacy review, and financial controls fit together in a purchase, and the judgment to know when to push a request through and when to slow it down.

Preferred qualifications

• 5-7+ years of procurement operations, purchasing, or vendor operations, including time supporting a research, engineering, hardware, or outsourced services organization.
• Experience as the embedded procurement partner for a hyper scaling data operations, ML, RL, and lab environments
• Time at a hypergrowth technology company scaling procurement operations for outsourced or vendor delivered work.
• Background in accounting, accounts payable, or a month-end close process, including experience with three-way match
• Sourced human data, data labeling, annotation, or evaluation vendors (or comparable BPO and outsourced operations) with a point of view on where that market is heading
• Direct experience with Zip, Workday Financials, and Ironclad.
• Prior ownership of month end accrual review or open PO reconciliation for a large, variable spend portfolio 
• Experience designing tiered intake or approval frameworks that sped up low risk purchases without weakening controls.