Equity Accounting and Reporting

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

We are looking for an experienced accountant to own Equity Accounting and Reporting at Anthropic, based in San Francisco. You will be the one owner of equity accounting numbers across US GAAP, IFRS and local GAAP in every jurisdiction where we have employees holding equity: expense booking by entity, intercompany recharge booking, current and deferred tax on equity, and the equity footnote and local statutory disclosures, prepared once and reused. You will own equity reporting data from Shareworks, our equity administration platform, through to the ledgers, while staying hands-on: preparing and reviewing close materials, owning your own accounts, and serving as the first escalation point for the judgment calls in your domain.

Share-based compensation (SBC) is one of the most cross-functional areas of our reporting. Grants, vesting, exercises and the events that follow each carry requirements for US GAAP, IFRS and local GAAP expense, pushdown and recharge postings, tax provisioning, payroll withholding, transfer pricing and statutory disclosure, and those needs are met across Equity Administration, Equity Reporting, Accounting, Treasury, Tax, Transfer Pricing and Global Payroll from a single set of award-level records. This is a build role: you will take the open workstreams from manual to automated, work with Finance Systems and Shareworks to build the reports each stage needs, finalize the policies and agreements that sit behind recharges, and bring the end-to-end process to a scalable, efficient and fully compliant close. We are looking for someone who has owned equity accounting in a growing global organization before and wants to do it again at one of the most important companies in the world.

Key responsibilities

Close ownership

• Own the equity portfolio through month-end and quarter-end close: US GAAP, IFRS and local GAAP equity expense, pushed down and booked by entity, including reconciliations, journal entries and variance commentary

• Own intercompany recharge booking: invoicing, settlement, Treasury communication and the foreign exchange (FX) that follows

• Own current and deferred tax on equity by entity and in local currency, including the IFRS deferred tax mark to the share price and windfalls or shortfalls through the tax provision

• Ensure every close deliverable is audit-ready, with clear documentation of positions and supporting evidence

Technical accounting and policy

• Write, own and maintain the accounting policies and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for equity across US GAAP, IFRS and local GAAP: grant-date fair value and expense schedules, recharge basis by entity, mobility apportionment, and the treatment of cancellations, modifications and one-off events

• Partner closely with Tax to close every open policy position and execute the recharge agreements that depend on them

• Research the tax and accounting rules for each new jurisdiction entered and categorize it under our framework before the first grant lands there

• Own the equity footnote and local statutory disclosures for all entities, including the award rollforward for each period with internal transfers, and the external audit responses that support them

Controls

• Design and operate Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) controls across equity expense, recharges and deferred tax; review control evidence and own timely remediation of any gaps

• Establish completeness and cut-off controls so that the same award, the same entity, the same event dates and the same FX rate flow from Shareworks to every ledger, report and return

Systems and automation

• Anticipate changes in reporting needs and work with Finance Systems and Shareworks to build them: IFRS expense and deferred tax reports in local currency at Workday rates, mobility snapshots driving expense apportionment, corporate tax apportionment rules, and exercise and disclosure reports with mobility detail

• Automate the monthly pushdown and recharge postings and the reconciliation of deferred tax to expense reports, replacing manual work

• Document workflows and controls in a way that supports knowledge transfer, audit evidence and scale

Cross-functional partnership

• Partner with Equity Administration, Equity Reporting, Accounting, Treasury, Tax, Transfer Pricing and Global Payroll so each stage of an award is handled from every statutory and reporting perspective and every stakeholder has the data they need

• Record in the local books (secondary ledgers) the local SBC expense and recharges that feed the cost base for transfer pricing

• Translate complex equity accounting into plain language for non-finance stakeholders

Equity events

• Lead the cross-functional, cross-jurisdictional review of one-off equity events such as tender offers and share repurchases, covering the accounting, the deduction, payroll withholding, Treasury and the resulting disclosures

• Coordinate with Tax and advisers on open conclusions, such as the apportionment logic for corporation tax versus payroll tax, so report configurations are right before they are built, manual rework is minimized and the data serves every purpose it is built for

Minimum qualifications

• Certified Public Accountant (CPA) or equivalent professional accounting qualification

• Deep, hands-on experience with stock-based compensation under Accounting Standards Codification Topic 718 (ASC 718), IFRS 2 and local GAAP, including equity roll-forwards and reconciliation to an equity administration platform

• Experience with the tax accounting for equity: current and deferred tax by entity, mobility apportionment, and windfalls and shortfalls through the provision

• Experience owning a portfolio of accounts through close in a public company or pre-initial public offering (IPO) environment, including designing and operating SOX controls

• Experience writing and maintaining accounting policies and SOPs, and being accountable for how they are applied

• Ability to structure ambiguous problems, reach defensible conclusions and document them clearly

• Clear written and verbal communication with non-accounting partners

Preferred qualifications

• Progressive accounting experience that combines Big 4 audit with time at a high-growth or startup company

• A clear point of view on how artificial intelligence (AI) tools can eliminate low-value accounting work, and a track record of putting it into practice

• A project management qualification or experience running cross-functional workstreams

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.