Manager of Applied AI Architecture, Startups

External

Anthropic · San Francisco, CA

Full-timeOn-site3d ago

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About the role

As a Manager of Startups Applied AI Architects at Anthropic, you will drive adoption of frontier AI by leading a team of technical architects to help startups build AI-native products with the Claude Developer Platform. Your team is expected to win the trust of founders and engineers by supporting their technical ambitions from early product to scale. You'll bring your own builder credibility and startup instincts to the role - setting the vision for what great technical partnership looks like in the startup segment, developing a high-performing team, and personally carrying relationships with Anthropic's most strategic early-stage accounts. This is a role for a proven technical go-to-market leader who knows how to build teams that move at startup speed, earn the trust of deeply technical buyers, and turn a scrappy early engagement into a lasting technical partnership. You'll define the playbooks for nurturing and scaling new customers, set the bar for technical excellence, and grow the people - while staying close enough to the ground to know what's actually working. You will partner with the New Business sales leader and work as one team to support your customers.

Responsibilities

Lead, develop, and grow a team of Startups Applied AI Architects - setting a high bar for technical credibility, customer impact, and startup-paced execution

Drive team performance through clear goal-setting, regular coaching, and a culture of continuous technical development

Personally lead pre-sales engagements with high-priority startup accounts, from initial technical discovery through deployment and expansion, modeling what great looks like for your team

Build and own the segment's technical playbooks: how to run technical evaluations, develop customer-specific eval frameworks, architect LLM solutions for resource-constrained early-stage teams, and win against competitive alternatives

Partner with aligned Account Executives and GTM leadership to shape segment strategy and drive Claude API adoption across the startup ecosystem

Ensure your team consistently surfaces insights on how startups are building with Claude - emerging use cases, deployment patterns, architectural decisions - and translate that signal into actionable feedback for Product and Engineering

Drive cross-functional influence across Sales, Product, and Engineering to advance startup customer needs and shape roadmap priorities

Build Anthropic's technical presence and credibility in the startup ecosystem through events, conferences, workshops, and content

Stay ahead of the AI engineering landscape - context engineering, eval frameworks, agentic architectures, developer tooling - and ensure your team is operating at the frontier

You may be a good fit if you:

Have 8+ years of experience in technical customer-facing roles (Solutions Architect, Sales Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, or similar), with 5+ years leading and managing pre-sales or technical go-to-market teams

Have a strong track record of building and developing high-performing SA teams - you know how to hire well, coach effectively, and create an environment where technical talent grows and does their best work

Have deep experience working with startups or high-growth technology companies - you understand the velocity, constraints, and culture of early-stage companies and know how technical decisions get made at each stage of the journey

Bring genuine builder credibility: you've built and deployed LLM-powered applications, you speak the language of founders and founding engineers, and you can earn the trust of deeply technical audiences without relying on a title

Have hands-on expertise with context engineering, LLM evaluation frameworks, and modern AI architectures, and can guide both your team and customers through the decisions that separate a prototype from a production-grade system

Are comfortable with Python and fluent in the LLM frameworks, tools, and integration patterns common in startup engineering stacks

Are energized by building in ambiguous environments - you're excited to define the playbook, not just run it, and you thrive in fast-moving contexts where the technology and the customer segment are both evolving rapidly

Have a genuine passion for making powerful technology safe and societally beneficial

Strong candidates may have:

Experience as a technical founder or in a founder-led sales motion, giving you firsthand understanding of what technical buyers in the startup world are actually evaluating

A track record of winning competitive technical evaluations against other LLM providers

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Manager of Applied AI Architecture, Startups

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