Director, Infrastructure Lease Accounting

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 seeking a Director, Infrastructure Lease Accounting to lead technical accounting for our most complex infrastructure and energy arrangements — the data center leases and related structures underpinning our recently significant investment in American computing infrastructure. As we continue our rapid growth, you will ensure the financial statement accuracy of the most technically complex contracts we enter into.

This is an opportunity to be at the heart of one of the fastest-scaling companies in the industry, and to shape how Anthropic accounts for the highest-stakes arrangements underpinning our compute and energy portfolio.

You will serve as the technical accounting subject matter expert for arrangements spanning data center leases (ASC 842), and counterparty or joint-venture structures (ASC 810 VIE analysis). You'll work closely with Real Estate, Legal, Finance, and external auditors to ensure accounting implications are understood before commitments are made.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the technical accounting subject matter expert for Anthropic's most complex infrastructure arrangements, leading classification, measurement, and subsequent accounting judgments

• Apply ASC 842 to complex lease arrangements, including lease identification, modifications, reassessments, and embedded leases within compute, colocation, and data center contracts

• Apply ASC 810 to counterparty and joint-venture structures, including variable interest entity (VIE) analysis for special purpose entities

• Apply ASC 815 to energy and infrastructure arrangements, including consideration of embedded derivatives

• Lead technical accounting analysis and memo preparation for new arrangements, ensuring positions are well-reasoned, supported, and auditor-ready

• Partner with Real Estate, Legal, and Finance teams during contract negotiation and execution to ensure accounting implications are understood before commitments are made

• Serve as a trusted finance partner to non-finance stakeholders — explaining the financial statement impact of their decisions in clear, simple terms they can act on

• Serve as a key point of contact with external auditors on technical accounting matters within your portfolio

• Mentor accounting professionals across the Infrastructure Accounting team on technical accounting matters

• Drive process improvements and automation, including leveraging AI tooling, to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of technical accounting work

Minimum qualifications

• Have 12+ years of progressive experience in accounting, with meaningful time in a technical accounting role

• Hold a Bachelor's degree in Accounting or Finance; CPA required

• Possess strong technical accounting knowledge of ASC 842 (leases), ASC 810 (consolidation, including VIE analysis), and ASC 815 (derivatives and hedging), applied to real arrangements

• Have a track record of authoring and defending technical accounting memos on complex, judgment-intensive arrangements

• Demonstrate strong analytical abilities and comfort working with large, complex contracts and datasets

• Have a track record of improving scalable technical accounting processes in fast-moving environments

• Are adept at translating technical accounting concepts into financial implications for non-finance stakeholders

• Communicate clearly and influence effectively across cross-functional partners — Real Estate, Legal, Finance, and Procurement

• Have experience partnering with engineering, infrastructure, or operations teams to improve financial reporting and cost transparency

Preferred qualifications

• Background in a Big 4 technical accounting practice (SEC reporting / technical consultation) combined with industry experience

• Experience at hyperscalers, utilities, or energy companies with meaningful PPA, REC, or commodity-arrangement exposure

• Experience with renewable energy contracts, carbon markets, or related clean-energy accounting frameworks

• Exposure to data center and compute-related infrastructure arrangements (including colocation, dark fiber IRUs, and equipment leases)

• Experience with lease accounting software and derivative / hedge accounting systems at scale

• SQL proficiency for querying and analyzing large contract and accounting datasets

• Knowledge of AI/ML infrastructure and associated cost structures

• Experience applying AI tooling (including Claude) to technical accounting research, memo drafting, or close automation

• Proven ability to navigate ambiguity and drive results in rapidly changing environments

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.

Annual Salary:$230,000—$300,000 USD

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.

For roles performing work in California: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records or criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.

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.