Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

About Anthropic

Anthropics 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 Anthropic

Anthropics 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 building the Applied AI team to help the worlds most ambitious organizations adopt Claude in ways that are transformative safe and lasting. Our Forward Deployed Engineers embed directly with strategic customers to ship production AI applications that solve real business problems. As this practice grows we need a founding leader to build and scale it.

As the first FDE Manager youll own the team that sits at the frontier of enterprise AI deployment. Youll hire and develop a high-performing team of FDEs set the technical and operational bar for customer engagements and build the playbooks that turn one-off successes into repeatable patterns. Youll work hand-in-hand with Engagement Managers who own delivery logistics and stakeholder management while you ensure your team is shipping quality code growing technically and representing Anthropic at the highest level in customer environments.

This is a player-coach role with a strong bias toward leadership. Youll stay close enough to the technical work to review architectures debug production issues and pair with your team when it matters but your primary impact will come from the people you hire the standards you set and the culture you create. Youll partner cross-functionally with Sales Product and Engineering to shape how Anthropic serves its most strategic customers and your teams field insights will directly influence product direction.

This role requires someone who thrives in ambiguity and is energized by building from zero to one. Youll be defining what good looks like for FDE management at Anthropic there is no existing playbook to follow.

Responsibilities

• Hire develop and retain a world-class team of Forward Deployed Engineers. Set a high bar for technical talent and customer instincts.
• Conduct regular 1:1s provide technical mentorship and invest in the career growth of each team member. Create an environment where FDEs do the best work of their careers.
• Staff and oversee customer engagements across your teams portfolio making resource allocation decisions that balance customer needs team development and business priorities.
• Collaborate with account teams and Engagement Managers during the pre-sales process to qualify engagements scope work and inform statements of work.
• Review technical architectures and code produced by your FDEs ensuring the team ships high-quality production-ready solutions that solve real customer problems.
• Stay hands-on enough to lead technical discovery sessions prototype solutions and debug complex issues alongside your team when needed.
• Build repeatable playbooks starter repositories integration templates and an internal knowledge base that captures what your team learns in the field.
• Define team OKRs that tie to customer success outcomes and product adoption goals. Create operational cadences standups retros engagement reviews that keep the team aligned.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to translate field insights into product improvements. Serve as the voice of the customer in internal planning.
• Travel to customer sites as needed (25-50%) particularly during engagement kickoffs and for your teams highest-priority accounts.

You May Be a Good Fit If You Have

• 10 years of experience in software engineering solutions architecture or a technical customer-facing role such as forward deployed engineering or consulting.
• 2 years of people management experience within a services/post-sales/FDE organization with a track record of hiring developing and retaining strong engineers.
• Experience building organizations from 0->1not just inheriting an existing one.
• Experience working directly with enterprise customers on technical implementations including comfort navigating complex organizational dynamics.
• Executive presence with the ability to move fluidly between strategic conversations with senior stakeholders and hands-on debugging sessions with engineers.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills. You can translate technical complexity into clear narratives for diverse audiences.
• Genuine excitement about building something new and defining what great looks like for a team that doesnt yet exist.

Why This Role Matters

Youll be a founding leader of a team that defines how enterprises adopt and scale AI. Your work will directly influence Anthropics product direction create reusable patterns for the broader customer base and establish Anthropic as the trusted partner for AI transformation all while advancing the responsible development of frontier AI systems.

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelors degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

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 arent 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 youre interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones were 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 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 youre ever unsure about a communication dont click any linksvisit for confirmed position openings.

How were 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. Were 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 aboutour policyfor using AI in our application process