Description
About the Role
Anthropic is building the Applied AI team to help the world's most ambitious organisations 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, you'll own the team that sits at the frontier of enterprise AI deployment. You'll 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. You'll 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. You'll 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. You'll partner cross-functionally with Sales, Product, and Engineering to shape how Anthropic serves its most strategic customers, and your team's field insights will directly influence product direction.
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 team's 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 team's 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 organisation with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers.
- Experience building organisations from 0->1, not just inheriting an existing one.
- Experience working directly with enterprise customers on technical implementations, including comfort navigating complex organisational 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 doesn't yet exist.
Why This Role Matters
You'll be a founding leader of a team that defines how enterprises adopt and scale AI. Your work will directly influence Anthropic's 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.