Head of Partner Success

Anthropic Anthropic · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · Sales

Build and lead the Partner Success team from scratch at Anthropic, focusing on enabling consulting and systems integration firms to successfully build practices around Claude. This involves hiring and managing a team, defining operational processes, selecting and managing key partners, driving adoption and expansion of AI products within partner-led customer engagements, and ensuring partners are up-to-date with new AI capabilities.

What you'd actually do

  1. Build and lead the Partner Success team from scratch. Hire your first partner success managers, define how they run their portfolios, and build the operating system the team inherits.
  2. Personally carry a portfolio of managed partners as your reference implementation. Be the standard for what good looks like before asking anyone else to do it.
  3. Decide which partners get the team's attention. Design the criteria for entry into and graduation from the managed portfolio, and reshape it as the data comes in.
  4. Design the team's engagement model. Define when proactive engagement is warranted, when reactive engagement is triggered by clear signals, and when partners are better served by routing, programmatic enablement, and the certified bench.
  5. Run the joint planning and business review cadence with each managed partner. Quarterly business reviews with alliance and practice leads. Joint goal-setting on customer adoption, certified architects, references, and industry positioning.

Skills

Required

  • Six to ten years of experience working with consulting and systems integration partners at a software company, cloud platform, or partner-led business, with at least two of those years managing a team.
  • Built or scaled a partner-facing team from scratch before — hiring, onboarding, methodology creation — not just managed an existing team.
  • Deep understanding of how partner success works in a usage-based business. You have held a number tied to customer behavior (adoption, retention, expansion) rather than contract signature.
  • Strong commercial instincts on partner selection and co-investment funding. You can tell which partners are worth investing in and which look impressive on paper but will not ship customer outcomes.
  • Experience running scalable partner or practitioner enablement, or the hunger to learn it. You understand the difference between a training program that gets attendance and one that changes what practitioners do in customer engagements the next week.
  • Enough technical fluency to be credible in an architecture review. You do not need to write code, but you can follow the conversation and ask the right questions.

What the JD emphasized

  • partner success works in a usage-based business
  • partner-facing team from scratch
  • built or scaled a partner-facing team from scratch before