Manager of Applied AI Architecture, Commercial
Anthropic · San Francisco, United States +1 · 1mo ago
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
As the Manager of Commercial Applied AI Architects at Anthropic, you will drive adoption of frontier AI across our mid-market and SMB customers by leading a team of technical architects who help companies build and deploy with the Claude API, Claude Code, the Agent SDK, and Claude for Enterprise. Commercial is one of Anthropic's largest and fastest-moving books of business: thousands of companies, a rapidly growing sales team, and a small group of architects whose job is to change deal outcomes where technical depth matters most. Your team's leverage does not come from being everywhere. It comes from choosing the right accounts to go deep on, then turning what they learn there into blueprints, demos, tooling, and enablement that reach the rest of the book.
You will bring your own builder credibility and technical judgment to the role. Our architects ship working code: prototypes, eval frameworks, near-production examples that customers extend, and internal tooling that scales the team itself. You do not need to be the strongest engineer in the room, but you should expect to be in the work with your team, not just reviewing it from above. When an architect is deep in a hard engagement, you will often be right there alongside them, unblocking, pairing, and pressure-testing, while the account itself stays theirs.
This is a first-line leadership role reporting to the Head of Applied AI, Commercial. You will start by managing a team of architects and are expected to help grow it well beyond its current size, partnering with Commercial sales leadership on coverage, qualification, and where technical investment pays off. You will co-own the strategy for how Applied AI shows up in the Commercial segment, and you will be judged on your team's outcomes and growth, not your own.
Responsibilities:
- Manage, coach, and grow a team of Commercial Applied AI Architects, setting a high bar for technical credibility, customer impact, and speed
- Own hiring for your team as it scales, defining the profile, running the loop, and building onboarding that gets new architects into customer conversations quickly
- Set goals and run reviews for your team, and develop each architect's career with clear, direct feedback
- Decide where your team's depth goes. Own the qualification and prioritization framework for Applied AI engagement across a very large book, and be comfortable saying no
- Work alongside your architects on their most consequential engagements, from technical discovery through deployment and expansion, and model what great looks like without taking the work off their plate
- Build and own the segment's technical playbooks for Claude API integrations, Claude Code rollouts, agentic architectures on the Agent SDK, and Claude for Enterprise deployments, and turn account-level wins into reusable assets that scale one-to-many
- Partner closely with Commercial sales leadership and Account Executives to co-build segment strategy, tighten the AE-to-architect operating model, and drive adoption across mid-market and SMB
- Ensure your team consistently surfaces how mid-market companies are building with Claude, and translate that signal into actionable feedback for Product and Engineering
- Represent Anthropic technically at customer sites, workshops, roadshows, and events, and contribute to thought leadership through content and speaking
- Stay ahead of the AI engineering landscape, including agentic architectures, eval design, context engineering, and developer tooling, and keep your team operating at the frontier
You may be a good fit if you:
- Have 7+ years of experience in technical customer-facing roles (Solutions Architect, Sales Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, or similar), with 3+ years managing pre-sales or technical go-to-market teams
- Know how to hire well, coach effectively, give hard feedback kindly, and create an environment where builders do their best work
- Have led technical teams in a high-velocity, high-volume sales motion, where the constraint is your team's capacity rather than pipeline, and have a real point of view on how to allocate scarce technical talent across a large book
- Bring builder credibility. You have built and deployed LLM-powered applications, you understand what separates a prototype from a production system, and you can hold your own with a customer's engineering leadership
- Have hands-on familiarity with agentic architectures, LLM evaluation, and modern AI developer tooling, and can coach architects through the design decisions their customers face
- Have a systems mindset. When you see a problem, your instinct is to build one thing that serves ten customers rather than ten things that serve one
- Are comfortable in ambiguous, early-stage environments where the playbook does not exist yet, and have a track record of building structure as you go
- Have strong executive presence and can build trust with technical and business leaders alike
- Have a genuine passion for making powerful technology safe and societally beneficial
Strong candidate may have:
- Scaled a technical pre-sales or forward-deployed team from a handful of people to a mature function, including defining the hiring bar, onboarding programs, and coaching systems from scratch
- Sold to and built for mid-market companies, with a clear understanding of how technical buying decisions differ between a 500-person company and a Fortune 500
- Rolled out AI coding assistants or developer tools inside engineering organizations, and know how those teams evaluate, adopt, and measure them
- A visible technical presence through conference talks, written content, or open-source contributions
The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.
For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.
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. 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 you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're 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 from @anthropic.com email 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. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.
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. 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. We're 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 about our policy for using AI in our application process.