Procurement Operations Business Partner, R&D Operations

Procurement Operations is the front door for buying at Anthropic. We are hiring a Procurement Operations Business Partner to own the purchasing path for our research organizations and special programs.

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
• Serve as the primary procurement partner for Anthropic's research teams and special programs
• Review every purchase request in your portfolio for correctness and completeness
• Determine what each request requires before it can move and route it to the right reviewers
• Launch and track contract review with Legal and confirm executed agreements
• Structure purchase orders to match vendor billing and Accounting needs
• Act as the dedicated operations partner for research services vendor portfolio
• Handle hardware, equipment, and lab purchasing mechanics

Financial completeness & accuracy:

• Code every purchase order correctly at creation
• Work with Accounting on hard cases and resolve issues
• Own the open purchase order book and ensure accuracy
• Serve as the first line reviewer for month-end accruals
• Partner with Accounts Payable to resolve invoice holds and PO mismatches

Stand up new programs:

• Be the first procurement call when a new research program spins up
• Scope purchasing needs and agree on a path with Legal, Security, and Finance
• Translate procurement requirements into plain language for researchers and engineers

Be the front door:

• Be visible and responsive in teams' Slack channels and office hours
• Apply purchasing policy consistently and explain the reasoning

Continuous improvement:

• Maintain playbooks, intake guidance, and standard operating procedures
• Identify manual steps and failure points and implement fixes

Minimum qualifications:

• Proven track record of owning a high-volume purchasing portfolio
• Solid working knowledge of accrual accounting
• Experience supporting outsourced or managed service vendors
• Working knowledge of contract review, security and privacy review, and financial controls

Preferred qualifications:

• 5-7+ years of procurement operations, purchasing, or vendor operations
• Experience as an embedded procurement partner for a hyper-scaling data operations, ML, RL, and lab environments
• Time at a hypergrowth technology company scaling procurement operations
• Background in accounting, accounts payable, or month-end close process
• Direct experience with Zip, Workday Financials, and Ironclad