Manager of 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 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 with strategic customers to ship production AI applications that solve real business problems. FDEs sit at the tip of the spear: operating within customer environments to ship safe and reliable applications built on Claude. We are hiring strong leaders to oversee these high visibility deployments as we expand this motion.

As an FDE Manager you will hire and develop a team of exceptional Forward Deployed Engineers and focus this team on a portfolio of agent deployments for the largest enterprises in the world. This role requires leaders with a strong engineering background and instincts for working well in customer environments. FDE Managers will be expected to drive clarity amidst an ever-changing environment: galvanizing their team to solve challenging problems that have a real-world impact. Your work will directly influence Anthropics product direction create reusable deployment patterns and establish Anthropic as the trusted partner for AI transformation for the Fortune 100.

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 program 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. Your team will work hand-in-hand with Technical Deployment Leads 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.

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 Technical Deployment Leads 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 solutions that are safe reliable and production-ready
• Stay hands-on enough to lead technical discovery sessions ship code on occasion and debug complex issues alongside your team when needed.
• Coach your team to build repeatable playbooks starter repositories and integration templates that capture what you learn 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.
• Consistently uphold Anthropics values as you lead your team. Our FDEs should be strong representatives of Anthropics culture as they work within customer environments.
• 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

• 8 years of experience in software engineering 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. We are also open to candidates who have worked within traditional internal facing software engineering management roles but also have strong customer facing instincts.
• Experience building frontier LLM powered systems: ideally the development of agentic systems with leading edge models.
• 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.
• Experience building AI systems for highly regulated industries such as financial services healthcare pharmaceuticals or energy is a nice to have.

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelors 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 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