Senior Manager, Compute Accounting
Anthropic · San Francisco, United States +1 · 11h 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
As a Senior Manager, Compute Accounting at Anthropic, you will own the end-to-end accounting for our compute and cloud infrastructure spend, ensuring accurate financial reporting and robust controls as we scale. You'll be responsible for the complete lifecycle of compute cost accounting—from contract review and technical accounting assessment, through accruals, prepaids, accounts payable reconciliation, expense classification, and commitment tracking. This role requires deep expertise in accounting for compute usage, strong technical accounting judgment, and the ability to build scalable processes, controls, and accounting policy in a high-growth environment, with a strong appetite for process transformation and automation.
You'll partner directly with Engineering, Legal, Procurement, and Finance & Strategy to ensure the accounting implications of our compute contracts are understood before commitments are made, and that costs are captured accurately and in compliance with our agreements. As Anthropic's compute footprint expands rapidly across multiple cloud service providers, you'll play a critical role in establishing the financial controls, accounting policy, and processes that enable us to manage compute spend worth enormous sums at our scale with precision and confidence. You'll also serve as a key point of contact with external auditors and mentor accounting professionals across the Compute Accounting team.
Key responsibilities
- Own the complete accounting lifecycle for compute and cloud infrastructure expenses, ensuring accurate and timely recording of all costs through monthly close, reconciliations, accruals, prepaids, journal entries, and flux analysis
- Review and interpret cloud service provider and infrastructure contracts to ensure proper accounting treatment, commitment tracking, and compliance with contractual terms
- Apply technical accounting expertise to complex compute infrastructure arrangements under ASC 842—including embedded-lease identification, lease vs. service classification, measurement, modifications, and reassessments
- Partner with Engineering, Legal, Procurement, and Finance teams during contract negotiation and execution to ensure accounting implications are understood before commitments are made
- Scope and formulate accounting policies governing how compute costs are recognized, classified, and amortized across an expanding portfolio of cloud service provider arrangements
- Design and implement accrual and prepayment processes that accurately reflect the timing and nature of cloud infrastructure costs, including capacity reservations, savings plans, and committed-use discounts
- Track and reconcile commitment-based agreements, ensuring proper recognition and disclosure of multi-year purchase obligations
- Lead accounts payable and vendor statement reconciliation efforts, working with cloud service providers to resolve discrepancies and ensure billing accuracy
- Build scalable processes and controls that can grow with the organization, and develop reporting and monitoring systems to provide visibility into compute spending patterns and trends
- Serve as a key point of contact with external auditors on compute cost accounting and commitment disclosure matters
- Collaborate with and mentor accounting professionals across the Compute Accounting team, and serve as the subject matter expert on compute accounting matters for cross-functional partners
- Lead process transformation and automation initiatives—redesigning close workflows, building automated data pipelines and reporting, and leveraging AI tooling—and manage cross-functional projects from scoping through delivery
Minimum qualifications
- CPA (or equivalent) with a deep understanding of GAAP and strong technical accounting skills
- Significant experience accounting for cloud service or compute infrastructure expenses, including review of associated contracts
- Working knowledge of ASC 842 as applied to compute, infrastructure, or data center arrangements (embedded leases, lease vs. service classification)
- Experience with cloud service provider cost structures and the unique challenges of accounting for consumption-based services
- Ability to translate complex contractual terms into proper accounting treatment, and to communicate the financial statement impact of decisions to non-finance stakeholders in clear, simple terms
- Proven experience building accounting processes, controls, and policy in high-growth environments
- Proficiency with modern ERP systems (NetSuite, Workday, Oracle, or similar)
Preferred qualifications
- 10+ years of progressive accounting experience
- Experience mentoring and developing accounting professionals
- A track record of leading process transformation, automation, or finance systems projects from scoping through delivery
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to dive deep into large datasets to identify issues and opportunities
- Comfort with cross-functional partnership in fast-paced environments where priorities can shift quickly
- SQL and BigQuery proficiency, enabling direct data analysis and validation against source systems
- Python skills for building automation and analytical tools
- Experience at cloud service providers, data center operators, or technology companies with consumption-based or usage-based business models
- Background combining Big 4 accounting or advisory experience with industry roles at technology companies
- Exposure to infrastructure lease or asset structures, including colocation, GPU clusters, networking equipment, or data center buildouts
- Track record of implementing automated reconciliation and reporting solutions
- Familiarity with commitment-based purchasing agreements and their accounting implications
- Proficiency with AI-assisted tools (including Claude) for enhancing financial analysis, memo drafting, and close automation
- Experience supporting rapid growth and scaling initiatives
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.