Community Engagement Manager, Data Centers (Virginia & West Virginia)

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.

Anthropic is building AI systems that will shape the trajectory of one of the most consequential technologies in human history. That work requires physical infrastructure at significant scale, and building that infrastructure the right way means being a real, long-term partner to the communities where we operate.

We are looking for a Community Engagement Manager in Virginia and West Virginia to join our Public Policy team and serve as Anthropic's on-the-ground presence in the communities where our data centers are sited, built, and operated. This is not a communications role or a government affairs role, though you will do elements of both. It is a relationship role: your job is to make Anthropic a trusted, visible, and valued neighbor, from the earliest stages of site selection through construction and long-term operations.

You will be the connective tissue between Anthropic's Policy and Infrastructure teams and the local officials, community organizations, economic development partners, and residents who have a stake in what we build. You will surface concerns before they escalate, translate our technical and operational plans into clear local benefits, and build the coalitions that allow us to move quickly and responsibly. Because Anthropic's infrastructure footprint is still early in its growth, you will also help write the playbook: the processes you build in your first markets are the ones we will use as we expand.

You will travel regularly within Virginia and West Virginia, up to 50% of the time, and occasionally to other Anthropic data center markets.

Key responsibilities

• Build and maintain trusted, sustained relationships with Virginia boards of supervisors, city and town councils, and planning commissions, West Virginia county commissions and municipal officials, state economic development agencies, community groups, civic leaders, educational institutions, and workforce partners in the Virginia and West Virginia data center markets you cover

• Develop and execute a community engagement strategy for each of your markets, spanning site selection, pre-development, construction, and ongoing operations

• Build external coalitions, host education and listening sessions, and design local solutions that deliver real benefits to the communities where we operate

• Represent Anthropic in public forums, town halls, planning hearings, community events, and local media

• Monitor community sentiment and local political dynamics, and advise internal teams on risks, opportunities, and the right pace and posture for engagement, including in markets where data center development is already well established and community questions about its cumulative effects are active

• Partner with the Real Estate and Infrastructure team to bring community input into how projects are planned, communicated, and delivered, not just how they are announced

• Work with the Communications team to develop proactive, locally relevant messaging

• Coordinate charitable giving, community investment, and economic development commitments in your markets, including managing nonprofit partner relationships

• Partner with the Energy and Sustainability team to explain our approach to environmental stewardship and respond to questions about power, water, noise, transmission, and land use

• Build a community engagement playbook and repeatable processes that scale as Anthropic's infrastructure footprint grows

Minimum qualifications

• Experience in community affairs, public affairs, economic development, government relations, local or state government, or a closely related field

• Direct experience working for or engaging with local governments and a broad set of community stakeholders on behalf of large infrastructure, construction, energy, or technology projects, with a working understanding of how local politics and community dynamics actually play out

• A skilled relationship and coalition builder who earns trust with a diverse group of stakeholders, and who maintains relationships through difficult conversations

• The ability to represent a company credibly in public settings, including town halls, hearings, and press interviews

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to turn a complex operational plan into plain language that a local official or reporter can understand and respond to

• The ability to work independently, get up to speed quickly on complex policy issues, and manage multiple concurrent engagements across different markets without losing track of any of them

• Based in Virginia or West Virginia or willing to relocate to one of them, and prepared to travel regularly across both states

• 7+ years of experience in community engagement specifically on data center, utility, energy, or large-scale industrial infrastructure projects, or in local government

• Familiarity with land use, zoning, and permitting processes at the county and municipal level, including rezoning and special use permit hearings in Virginia

• Experience with community concerns around data center siting, such as noise, transmission lines, water, and proximity to residential areas

• Experience managing corporate social responsibility programs

• Established relationships with economic development, workforce, or civic organizations in the markets this role covers, including in Appalachian and energy-transition communities

• Experience working with real estate, legal, communications, and policy teams at the same time

• A genuine interest in the communities where you work, not just the projects you are managing

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.

$265,000—$295,000 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.

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.