Commercial Counsel, Datacenters & Construction

As a Commercial Counsel for Datacenters & Construction at Anthropic, you will lead legal execution for the company's largest physical infrastructure transactions, including direct datacenter leases, construction agreements, and financing structures. This role involves close partnership with specialized outside counsel, coordinating external work with Anthropic's commercial objectives and overall compute strategy. You will negotiate long-term datacenter leases, support power purchase agreements, manage construction-adjacent agreements, and oversee legal workstreams for complex financing structures, ensuring alignment with AI-specific requirements.

Must Have

• Negotiate long-term datacenter leases with major developers
• Support and structure power purchase agreements
• Negotiate utility interconnection agreements
• Manage utility-related legal requirements or initiatives
• Coordinate construction-adjacent agreements including design-build contracts, equipment procurement, and commissioning schedules
• Manage legal workstreams for complex financing structures (e.g., sale-leasebacks, tax components, or project finance vehicles)
• Work closely with specialized outside counsel (real estate and financing specialists)
• Collaborate with compute team’s transaction managers
• Coordinate with finance and corporate development on strategic deal structuring
• Understand how datacenter legal structures interact with the compute capacity they will house
• Escalate novel structures or terms that create downstream risk for Anthropic’s operational flexibility to managers
• Ensure facility designs accommodate AI-specific requirements including high-density power, liquid cooling infrastructure, and rapid scaling capacity
• JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar
• At least 8 years of relevant legal experience with meaningful exposure to project finance, construction contracts, or infrastructure real estate transactions
• Fluency in commercial real estate and construction contracting
• Experience with EPC, AIA, and design-build arrangements at scale
• Comfort with project finance structures and the interplay between lease, financing, and development agreements
• Ability to coordinate effectively with specialized outside counsel
• Strong judgment about when deal terms create downstream risk for operational flexibility
• Effective collaboration skills for working with business teams
• Communication skills that translate complex real estate and financing concepts into clear risk assessments for business stakeholders
• Genuine interest in infrastructure development and appreciation for why datacenter capacity is mission-critical for frontier AI
• Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience

Good to Have

• In-house experience at datacenter developers supporting leasing, project development, and financing transactions
• Background at infrastructure private equity firms with exposure to datacenter or similar infrastructure investments
• Experience at large technology companies with datacenter construction programs supporting development transactions from the buy side
• Law firm experience at practices with infrastructure finance or project development specialization, particularly those who have worked on datacenter, power, or similar infrastructure financings
• Prior involvement in transactions requiring sophisticated understanding of construction timelines, commissioning requirements, and operational handoff
• Familiarity with tax structures, sale-leaseback arrangements, or other financing vehicles used in large-scale infrastructure development

Perks & Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits
• Optional equity donation matching
• Generous vacation
• Parental leave
• Flexible working hours
• Lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues
• Visa sponsorship

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 Commercial Counsel for Datacenters & Construction, you'll lead legal execution for Anthropic's largest physical infrastructure transactions: direct datacenter leases, construction agreements, and the financing structures that enable infrastructure investments at massive scale. This role focuses on facilities where Anthropic has direct control through ownership or long-term lease, complementing the colo & networks, and cloud compute legal teammates (facilities where Anthropic is tenant, and our hyperscaler relationships, respectively). You'll work in close partnership with specialized outside counsel on financing and real estate matters, serving as the in-house coordinator who ensures external work product aligns with Anthropic's commercial objectives and integrates with our overall compute strategy.

Responsibilities:

• Negotiate long-term datacenter leases with major developers, and represent some of Anthropic's largest and lengthy capital commitments
• Support and structure power purchase agreements, negotiate utility interconnection agreements, and manage utility-related legal requirements or initiatives e.g., renewables
• Coordinate construction-adjacent agreements including design-build contracts, equipment procurement, and commissioning schedules
• Manage legal workstreams for complex financing structures (e.g., sale-leasebacks, tax components, or project finance vehicles)
• Work closely with specialized outside counsel (real estate and financing specialists), ensuring their work product aligns with Anthropic's commercial objectives
• Collaborate with compute team’s transaction managers who handle operational execution and project management, providing legal and risk management expertise
• Coordinate with finance and corporate development on strategic deal structuring
• Understand how datacenter legal structures interact with the compute capacity they will house e.g., power requirements, cooling specifications, security standards, and expansion rights all flow from decisions made elsewhere in the Compute organization
• Escalate novel structures or terms that create downstream risk for Anthropic’s operational flexibility to managers; ensure facility designs accommodate AI-specific requirements including high-density power, liquid cooling infrastructure, and rapid scaling capacity

You might be a good fit if you have:

• JD and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar
• At least 8 years of relevant legal experience with meaningful exposure to project finance, construction contracts, or infrastructure real estate transactions
• Fluency in commercial real estate and construction contracting; datacenter lease structures, construction risk allocation, and financing arrangements (and how they will interact)
• Experience with EPC, AIA, and design-build arrangements at scale
• Comfort with project finance structures and the interplay between lease, financing, and development agreements
• Ability to coordinate effectively with specialized outside counsel while maintaining strategic direction
• Strong judgment about when deal terms create downstream risk for operational flexibility
• Effective collaboration skills for working with business teams who handle transaction management and site selection
• Communication skills that translate complex real estate and financing concepts into clear risk assessments for business stakeholders
• Genuine interest in infrastructure development and appreciation for why datacenter capacity is mission-critical for frontier AI

Strong candidates may have:

• In-house experience at datacenter developers supporting leasing, project development, and financing transactions
• Background at infrastructure private equity firms with exposure to datacenter or similar infrastructure investments
• Experience at large technology companies with datacenter construction programs (Meta, Google, Microsoft) supporting development transactions from the buy side
• Law firm experience at practices with infrastructure finance or project development specialization, particularly those who have worked on datacenter, power, or similar infrastructure financings
• Prior involvement in transactions requiring sophisticated understanding of construction timelines, commissioning requirements, and operational handoff
• Familiarity with tax structures, sale-leaseback arrangements, or other financing vehicles used in large-scale infrastructure development

Role-specific policy:

For this role, we expect staff to be able to work from our San Francisco or New York office at least 3 days a week, though we encourage you to apply even if you might need some flexibility for an interim period of time.

The expected base compensation for this position is below. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation.

Annual Salary:

$265,000 - $320,000 USD

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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.

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

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