Compute Country Lead, Japan

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 Anthropic is scaling compute internationally — growing our footprint in new countries. We're hiring a Country Lead to be the single, accountable owner of our compute strategy in Japan: the person who leads a team of cross-functional experts driving site selection, leasing, energy, financing, government relations and policy, community engagement, construction, and operations. This person will be ultimately responsible for bringing gigawatts of compute online in Japan. You won't build this alone. The specialist functions — leasing, energy, policy, construction, finance — are hired and managed centrally by functional leads based in San Francisco. Your job is to provide cross-functional leadership over that team in-country: coordinating and driving accountability across workstreams, while representing Anthropic externally with government and industry counterparts in Japan. This is a high-ambiguity, high-trust role for someone who can bring structure to a fast-growing, cross-functional effort without needing formal authority to do it. Responsibilities • Own the end-to-end strategy and coordination for Anthropic's compute build-out in Japan, from initial site selection through construction and operations. While each component will be run by subject matter experts, this role will act as the overall leader and coordinator of that team. • Serve as the primary point of accountability for cross-functional workstreams; leasing, financing, energy, government relations/policy, community engagement, construction, and operations. • Provide working leadership to the in-country cross-functional team, driving alignment and unblocking issues. • Represent Anthropic with government officials, utilities, energy providers, and other external stakeholders in Japan. • Build and maintain relationships within the Japanese government and the energy industry to support site, power, and policy outcomes. • Track progress and surface risks across parallel workstreams as the country's compute footprint scales from initial sites to multiple gigawatts. • Translate between Anthropic's global compute priorities and the specific regulatory, political, and market conditions in Japan. Requirements • Japanese national with established links into government and the energy industry strongly preferred. • Structured thinker with a track record of learning new domains quickly and going deep fast. • Excellent communicator, comfortable representing Anthropic to senior government, utility, and industry stakeholders. • Demonstrated ability to lead and coordinate cross-functional teams without direct line authority. • Hyper-organized and detail-oriented, with the ability to own multiple concurrent workstreams at once. • Comfortable with ambiguity; a problem solver who drives structure into undefined situations. • Background in energy, infrastructure, or a related sector. Nice to have • Prior experience with large-scale infrastructure or datacenter development. • Existing relationships with Japanese federal or provincial government bodies relevant to energy, land use, or industrial development. • Experience managing or overseeing capital-intensive projects. • Familiarity with the compute, cloud, or datacenter industry. 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 A