Senior Manager, Workforce Accounting

Anthropic · San Francisco

Finance & Legalposted 3mo ago

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 looking for a Senior Manager, Workforce Accounting to join Anthropic's Corporate Accounting Operations team. You will own every number tied to how we pay, equip and reward the people who work here: payroll and accrued compensation, stock-based compensation benefits and relocation, commissions, contingent workers, and travel and expense. Reporting to the Head of Corporate Accounting, you will lead a team of accountants while staying hands-on; reviewing close materials, owning your own accounts, and serving as the first escalation point for the judgment calls in your domain.

Workforce is one of the fastest-moving areas of our P&L. As headcount grows across new entities and geographies, equity programmes are becoming more complex, and the systems that feed payroll, equity and expense data into the ledger are still being wired together. This is a build role: you will write the policies and SOPs your team operates against, design the controls, shape the system integrations, and use Claude and other tools to automate the work that does not need to be manual. We are looking for someone who has built accounting infrastructure in high-growth environments before and wants to do it again at one of the most important companies in the world.

Key responsibilities

Close ownership

Own the workforce portfolio through month-end and quarter-end close — payroll and accrued compensation, bonus, vacation, severance and retention accruals, benefits, relocation, commissions, contingent workers, and T&E — including reconciliations, journal entries and variance commentary
Own stock-based compensation accounting end to end: expense recognition under ASC 718, cash-settlement matching, equity roll-forwards, and reconciliation of preferred stock, common stock and additional paid-in capital to the equity administration platform
Own the headcount and compensation reporting that underpins close analytics and cost allocations
Ensure every close deliverable is audit-ready, with clear documentation of positions and supporting evidence

Technical accounting and policy

Write, own and maintain accounting policies and SOPs across the workforce domain — payroll accruals, ASC 718, commissions (ASC 340-40), contingent worker classification, and T&E — and evolve them as compensation programmes change
Review technical memos prepared by your team; ensure conclusions are well-supported and consistent with US GAAP
Partner with Technical Accounting on new or modified equity awards, plan changes and other non-routine compensation arrangements, and translate guidance into procedures the team can execute
Own the workforce-related footnotes and disclosures — employee benefit plans, stockholders' equity and net loss per share — and the external audit responses that support them

Controls

Design and operate SOX controls across payroll, equity and T&E; review control evidence and own timely remediation of any gaps
Establish cut-off and completeness controls around payroll registers, equity administration data and expense platforms so that what hits the ledger ties to source

Systems and automation

Shape the integrations between our ERP and the payroll, equity administration, commissions and T&E platforms — translating accounting requirements into specifications and test criteria, and owning data integrity once live
Identify repetitive, rules-based work across the team's workflows and build scalable solutions, including with Claude, to automate or replace it
Document workflows and controls in a way that supports knowledge transfer, audit evidence and scale

Cross-functional partnership

Partner with People Operations, Payroll, Total Rewards, Equity Administration, Sales Compensation, Tax and Legal so accounting reflects programme changes before they land in the ledger, not after
Extend workforce accounting processes to new entities and jurisdictions as Anthropic grows internationally
Translate complex compensation accounting into plain language for non-finance stakeholders

Team leadership

Coach and develop a team of accountants, providing timely, specific feedback that raises the technical and operational bar over time
Hire and onboard as the team grows; set clear expectations and build a culture of precision and continuous improvement
Move fluidly between reviewing your team's work and doing the work yourself

Minimum qualifications

Active CPA licence or equivalent professional accounting qualification
Deep, hands-on experience with payroll accounting and stock-based compensation under ASC 718, including equity roll-forwards and reconciliation to an equity administration platform
Experience owning a portfolio of accounts through close in a public company or pre-IPO environment, including designing and operating SOX controls
Experience writing and maintaining accounting policies and SOPs, and being accountable for how a team applies them
Experience managing or meaningfully coaching other accountants
Ability to structure ambiguous problems, reach defensible conclusions and document them clearly
Clear written and verbal communication with non-accounting partners

Preferred qualifications

Substantial progressive accounting experience that combines Big 4 audit with time at a high-growth or startup company
Experience with commissions accounting (ASC 340-40), contingent worker accounting, or benefits and relocation programmes
Experience with complex equity structures — preferred stock, tender offers, modifications, or international equity plans
Experience preparing or supporting equity, employee benefit plan and net loss per share disclosures for external reporting
Experience leading or contributing to an ERP, payroll, equity or T&E system implementation or integration, particularly where requirements were evolving mid-project
Experience extending payroll and equity accounting to new entities or countries
A clear point of view on how AI tools can eliminate low-value accounting work, and a track record of putting it into practice

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$230,000—$300,000 USD

Logistics

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.

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