Strategic Overview
Head of National Security Sales (DoW/IC) at Anthropic is a leadership opportunity centered on the specialist responsibilities and outcomes described in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as Build, lead, and scale a national security sales team covering the DoW and IC, including hiring top talent, setting clear performance expectations, and providing ongoing coaching and development Develop and execute comprehensive go-to-market strategies for….
The role is listed for Washington, DC with the working arrangement published with the role, giving candidates the practical context needed to assess fit before applying.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
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.
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- Build, lead, and scale a national security sales team covering the DoW and IC, including hiring top talent, setting clear performance expectations, and providing ongoing coaching and development
- Develop and execute comprehensive go-to-market strategies for the DoW (including the military services, combatant commands, OSW, and defense agencies) and the IC, including market segmentation, competitive positioning, and revenue forecasting
- Anchor the team's work in mission impact: prioritize opportunities where safe, frontier AI materially changes how commands and agencies plan, analyze, and operate, and measure success by outcomes delivered to those who serve
- Own overall national security revenue targets and ensure team performance against quotas, while providing visibility into pipeline health and deal progression
Required Qualifications & Candidate Blueprint
- 15+ years of enterprise sales experience with 5+ years managing sales teams selling into the DoW and/or IC, with a proven track record of scaling revenue and building high-performing organizations
- Demonstrated ability to build, maintain, and leverage senior military, civilian, and leadership relationships across the DoW and IC—with an existing network of contacts across the national security community strongly preferred
- Deep understanding of DoW and IC missions, organizational structures, modernization initiatives, and technology adoption patterns across multiple services, commands, and agencies
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: $550,000 – $700,000 USD
- Own overall national security revenue targets and ensure team performance against quotas, while providing visibility into pipeline health and deal progression
Full Job Description
The following is the complete job description supplied by the source. We sanitize unsafe markup and remove external links, but do not shorten or rewrite the employer's source content.
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
As the Head of National Security Sales (DoW/IC) at Anthropic, you'll lead and scale our national security sales organization to drive the adoption of safe, frontier AI across the Department of War and the Intelligence Community. You'll leverage your deep understanding of defense and intelligence missions and proven sales leadership expertise to build a high-performing team while establishing strategic relationships with key defense and intelligence organizations. Working closely with GTM, product, policy, engineering and marketing teams, you'll define and execute our go-to-market strategy for the DoW and IC while maintaining the highest standards of security and compliance.
Key responsibilities
- Build, lead, and scale a national security sales team covering the DoW and IC, including hiring top talent, setting clear performance expectations, and providing ongoing coaching and development
- Develop and execute comprehensive go-to-market strategies for the DoW (including the military services, combatant commands, OSW, and defense agencies) and the IC, including market segmentation, competitive positioning, and revenue forecasting
- Anchor the team's work in mission impact: prioritize opportunities where safe, frontier AI materially changes how commands and agencies plan, analyze, and operate, and measure success by outcomes delivered to those who serve
- Own overall national security revenue targets and ensure team performance against quotas, while providing visibility into pipeline health and deal progression
- Win new business across the DoW and IC by helping commands, components, and agencies integrate AI into their technology stacks and mission workflows to accelerate delivery and mission outcomes
- Establish and refine sales processes, methodologies, and playbooks specific to DoW and IC procurement, including FAR/DFARS compliance, classified and unclassified contracting pathways, and agency-specific security and accreditation requirements
- Build and manage strategic relationships with cloud service providers, systems integrators, and Defense Industrial Base partners to create scalable go-to-market motions across classified and unclassified environments
- Synthesize market feedback and customer insights to inform product roadmap and competitive strategy, working closely with product and marketing teams
- Partner with legal, compliance, security, and delivery teams to ensure successful contract execution and customer satisfaction
- Maintain visibility and relationships with senior military, civilian, and IC leadership while empowering your team to own day-to-day customer relationships
- Implement metrics, reporting, and performance management systems to drive team accountability and continuous improvement
- Represent Anthropic at industry events and with key stakeholders, establishing our brand as the trusted AI partner for the national security community
Minimum qualifications
- 15+ years of enterprise sales experience with 5+ years managing sales teams selling into the DoW and/or IC, with a proven track record of scaling revenue and building high-performing organizations
- Demonstrated ability to build, maintain, and leverage senior military, civilian, and leadership relationships across the DoW and IC—with an existing network of contacts across the national security community strongly preferred
- Deep understanding of DoW and IC missions, organizational structures, modernization initiatives, and technology adoption patterns across multiple services, commands, and agencies
- Active security clearance (TS/SCI required) with ability to discuss capabilities in classified environments
- Demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain top sales talent while creating a culture of performance and accountability
- Experience developing and executing go-to-market strategies for emerging technologies in the national security space
- Extensive experience with defense and intelligence contracting vehicles, procurement mechanisms (including OTAs and IDIQs), and compliance and accreditation requirements such as FAR/DFARS, FedRAMP, and DoW Impact Levels
- Strong track record of consistently exceeding team revenue targets and building predictable, scalable sales motions
- Proven ability to build and manage strategic channel partnerships and ecosystem relationships, including cloud providers, systems integrators, and Defense Industrial Base primes
- Excellent communication and relationship-building skills across all levels, from technical teams to senior military, civilian, and IC leadership
- Experience implementing sales methodologies, CRM systems, and performance management processes
- A passion for safe and ethical AI development, with the ability to articulate its importance in national security contexts and build trust with DoW and IC stakeholders
Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
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.
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.
Editor’s Market Perspective (Our Custom Analysis)
Why This Position Matters
This leadership opening is a useful opportunity for candidates whose experience matches the role-specific capabilities named in the listing. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly Build, lead, and scale a national security sales team covering the DoW and IC, including hiring top talent, setting clear performance expectations, and providing ongoing coaching and development — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
For the application, mirror the employer's language where it truthfully matches your background: foreground the role-specific capabilities named in the listing, quantify outcomes from comparable work, and place the most relevant experience near the top of the resume. If the listing specifies tools, platforms, leadership scope, or domain experience, use those exact terms in context instead of presenting an unrelated keyword list.
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