Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

Lead a team of engineers embedded with enterprise customers to build and deploy AI applications in production. Balance hands-on technical work with hiring, team development, and establishing best practices for customer engagements.

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.

About The Role: Anthropic is building the Applied AI team to help the world's 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, 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.

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 organization with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers.
• Experience building organizations from 0->1, not 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.
• 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.

Annual Salary: £1-£1 GBP

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.

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.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from official 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.

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.

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.