Director, Accounting Systems Architect
San Francisco, CAFull-TimeDirectorAccounts / Finance
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 seeking an experienced Finance Systems Architect to join our Finance Systems team at Anthropic. In this role, you will lead the technical strategy and team responsible for Corporate Accounting, Finance Operations, and Treasury systems, with Workday Financials as the core platform. You will manage a team of Systems Engineers and Business Systems Analysts supporting the full operational finance technology stack—including GL, AP, payroll, T&E, and treasury—and pioneer automation strategies that leverage both SaaS solutions and AI, including Claude.
- This is a strategic leadership role that will directly shape how Anthropic's finance operations scale. You will work at the intersection of technical architecture, people leadership, and innovation, partnering with Accounting, Finance Operations, and Treasury leadership to build a world-class, intelligent financial systems foundation.
Responsibilities
- Systems Architecture & Technical Strategy: Own the technical roadmap for Corporate Accounting, Finance Operations, and Treasury systems; establish design standards, data governance frameworks, and integration best practices across Workday Financials and related platform
- Team Leadership: Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing team of Systems Engineers and Business Systems Analysts; manage workload allocation, prioritization, and career development
- Integration Design & Oversight: Architect and oversee integrations across the finance technology landscape—including Workiva, payroll, T&E, invoice processing, payments, and banking platforms—ensuring seamless data flow, system reliability, and compliance with security requirements
- Automation & AI Strategy: Define and execute the automation strategy for finance operations, pioneering the use of Claude and AI-powered solutions to transform workflows from reconciliations to close processes to payment operations
- Stakeholder Partnership: Serve as the primary technical partner to Corporate Accounting, Finance Operations, and Treasury leadership, translating business needs into system solutions and communicating roadmaps to senior leadership
- Compliance & Controls: Partner with IT, Security, and Internal Audit to ensure systems meet SOX compliance requirements; maintain documentation of controls, data lineage, and audit artifacts
You may be a good fit if you
- Have 15+ years of experience in finance systems, ERP implementation, or enterprise architecture roles, with at least 5 years of hands-on Workday Financials experience
- Have 5+ years of people management experience, leading technical teams in fast-paced environments with a track record of developing talent and building high-performing teams
- Have a proven track record of designing and delivering complex system integrations using APIs, middleware, and ETL tools
- Are skilled at developing and executing automation strategies in finance and accounting contexts, with measurable impact on efficiency and accuracy
- Possess strong understanding of end-to-end finance processes including General Ledger, accounts payable, payroll, T&E, treasury operations, and financial reporting
- Have excellent communication skills with the ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and influence at the leadership level
- Demonstrate strategic thinking with the ability to zoom out to architecture decisions and zoom in to implementation details
- Are comfortable with ambiguity and the pace of a rapidly scaling organization, balancing strategic initiatives with operational support needs
Strong candidates may also have
- Background in accounting, finance, or CPA certification with understanding of GAAP reporting requirements and SOX compliance
- Experience at high-growth technology companies, ideally through significant scaling or finance transformation
- Familiarity with AI/ML concepts and enthusiasm for applying them to finance operations; experience piloting or scaling AI-powered automation
- Experience with treasury systems including bank connectivity, payment platforms, and cash management solutions
- Experience with additional finance systems such as Workiva, NetSuite, Pigment, Coupa, or payroll and T&E platforms
- Technical proficiency with SQL, Python, or scripting languages for data analysis, integration support, or automation development
- Experience integrating Workday with external data platforms such as BigQuery or cloud data warehouses
- Experience implementing Workday Financials from the ground up or leading major ERP transitions
- Knowledge of Workday Prism Analytics, Accounting Center, or advanced reporting capabilities
- 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.
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.
