Director, SOX Infrastructure

Skills this role screens for

About the role

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.

The work

About the Role

We are looking for a SOX Director - Compute and Infrastructure to join our Internal Audit team at Anthropic. In this role, you will lead financial risk assessment and internal control design over compute and infrastructure. This is Anthropic's largest cost and one of the most complex areas of our financial reporting. You'll focus on cloud spend, usage-based costs, vendor commitments, accruals, and cost allocation, as we scale rapidly toward an IPO.

This is a unique opportunity to build SOX controls at an AI-first company, in a domain where few established playbooks exist. Compute is purchased under multi-year agreements with multiple providers, metered in third-party environments, accrued from internal telemetry, and increasingly provisioned and scheduled by automated systems and agents. You will help define how controls work in that environment for both business and IT environments, from reliance on service providers to full-population monitoring of high-volume usage data, while maintaining the rigor required for public company compliance.

As the SOX Director, Compute and Infrastructure, you will own scoping, control design, testing, remediation, and reporting for compute and infrastructure processes, partnering directly with Compute Accounting, Finance Analytics & BI, Infrastructure Engineering, Finance & Strategy, and Procurement to design scalable controls, oversee documentation, and support communication with external auditors. This role reports to the Head of Business Controls and plays a critical part in strengthening internal control maturity through pre-IPO readiness and beyond.

The work

Key responsibilities

• Lead financial risk and internal control design for compute and infrastructure accounting, including cloud spend, usage-based costs, vendor commitments, credits, refunds, accruals, cost allocation, budgeting, and asset lifecycle management
• Develop and execute the SOX control plan and roadmap for compute and infrastructure, making defensible prioritization calls on what must be controlled now and what can follow
• Own scoping, risk assessment, walkthroughs, testing, remediation, and reporting activities for compute and infrastructure processes
• Build scalable, automated, and sustainable controls to support growth through pre-IPO and post-IPO readiness
• Pioneer the use of AI and automation to enhance control effectiveness, including full-population matching of usage to invoices, continuous monitoring, and anomaly detection
• Design, implement, and monitor controls over the completeness, accuracy, and cutoff of compute cost, including monthly accruals built from internal workload telemetry and the true-up to provider invoices
• Establish controls over multi-year provider agreements, including reserved capacity, minimum spend commitments, usage-based charges, signing credits, service-level credits, refunds, and billing corrections
• Design and test controls over the allocation of compute cost between cost of revenue and research and development, including workload tagging, shared clusters, and changes to tagging logic or allocation models
• Establish the investigation threshold and variance criteria used in the control design to ensure the precision needed to detect a material misstatement
• Design and test controls over infrastructure related control inclusive of development of an asset lifecycle management system
• Oversee control documentation and ensure audit-ready evidence is maintained for all compute and infrastructure processes, in compliance with US GAAP and SEC reporting requirements
• Own control requirements across high-volume financial data pipelines, partnering with Finance Analytics &BI, Finance & Strategy, and Accounting to validate completeness, accuracy, classification, general-ledger mapping, key reports, and monthly close governance
• Own the identification and control treatment of key reports and Information Produced by the Entity (IPE) used in compute accruals, allocation, and the close
• Partner with IT SOX and engineering teams on the IT general controls and automated controls that support compute data, including interface, ITAC’s, and change management over pipelines and models
• Embed control requirements into new systems, pipelines, and process changes at design time
• Lead the assessment of reliance on cloud providers that meter and bill compute, including review of SOC 1 reports, scope and period coverage, bridge letters, and exceptions or qualified opinions
• Define and monitor complementary user entity controls, and design alternative procedures where a provider report is missing, does not cover the relevant system or period, or includes exceptions
• Assess how the use of AI in Finance and in the close changes what controls need to cover, and update the control environment accordingly
• Partner with Compute Accounting, Finance Analytics & BI, Infrastructure Engineering, Procurement, and Finance & Strategy to implement scalable controls over compute and infrastructure
• Work with the Compute Controller and Chief Accounting Officer organizations to align control priorities with business objectives
• Train and enable process owners and control performers, many of whom are new to SOX, on control execution, evidence retention, and what audit-ready means
• Support management's assessment of internal controls over financial reporting (ICFR) and related disclosures
• Serve as the primary point of contact for external auditors on compute and infrastructure SOX matters
• Prepare the Company's formal positions on control design, provider reliance, and deficiency evaluation for compute and infrastructure
• Manage audit requests, coordinate testing schedules, and facilitate walkthroughs across compute and infrastructure processes
• Track and report on control status, testing results, and remediation to leadership
• Drive alignment with external auditors on testing approaches, reliance strategies, and deficiency evaluation and aggregation assessment

Who they want

Minimum qualifications

• Have designed controls over cloud, compute, or infrastructure cost, or over a comparable high-volume, usage-based process, and understand control objectives, IPE, and sufficiency of audit evidence
• Have proven ability to establish or scale SOX controls at newly public or pre-IPO companies
• Possess deep understanding of compute accruals, vendor commitments, cost allocation, financial close, and US GAAP requirements
• Have experience evaluating service organization reports (SOC 1 and SOC 2) and complementary user entity controls
• Are comfortable working with large datasets and data pipelines, and partnering with data science and engineering teams
• Can structure ambiguous control problems and influence across stakeholders without direct authority
• Have strong project management, analytical, and communication skills
• Hold a Bachelor's degree in Accounting, Finance, Business Administration, IT/Engineering
• Are passionate about building scalable processes that support organizational growth and Anthropic's mission to create safe AI

Nice to have

Preferred qualifications

• Have 12+ years of hands-on SOX, internal audit, or internal controls experience, preferably in both Big 4 and in-house roles at a fast-paced technology company
• CPA (or similar certification) and/ or CISA
• Familiarity with cloud provider billing and commitment structures (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• SQL and comfort working directly with usage, telemetry, and cost data to validate what the systems are telling you
• Experience with controls over cost of revenue, gross margin reporting, and allocation…