Head of Forward Deployed Engineering
Anthropic
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 seeking an exceptional leader to build and scale our Forward Deployment Engineering (FDE) organization.
Reporting to the Global Head of Applied AI, you'll lead a team of elite engineers who embed directly with our most strategic customers to drive transformational AI adoption—from rapid prototyping to production deployment of custom agents and enterprise-scale AI systems.
You'll architect and operationalize our FDE service portfolio across traditional enterprises and digital native businesses, ensuring customers realize measurable value while building internal AI capabilities. This role requires equal parts technical depth, commercial acumen, and organizational leadership as you scale a high-leverage team that sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success.
Responsibilities:
Build and Scale the FDE Organization
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Lead, hire, and develop a world-class team of Forward Deployment Engineers, Engagement Managers, and Platform Specialists
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Establish hiring standards, onboarding programs, and career frameworks for technical roles (you've likely interviewed 500+ people and hired 50+ in previous roles)
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Build repeatable delivery methodologies for MCP server development, Claude Code SDLC integration, custom agent development, and API product acceleration and continue designing new packages as our products and models evolve.
Drive Customer Transformation at Scale
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Own delivery excellence for Tier 1 enterprise customers and strategic DNB partnerships requiring hands-on technical support beyond standard Customer Success
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Partner with Sales and Customer Success leadership to define target account criteria and engagement trigger
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Architect multi-agent solutions, Centers of Excellence frameworks, and API integration patterns that become referenceable at Fortune 500 scale
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Balance 1:1 bespoke engagements with 1:many scalable offerings, determining when to lean on partner ecosystem vs. direct delivery
Shape Product and GTM Strategy
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Synthesize field insights from customer engagements to influence Claude product roadmap, platform tooling (MCP, Agents SDK), and developer experience
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Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Research, and Field teams to translate customer pain points into product requirements
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Define clear handoff protocols between FDE, Customer Success (Activation Managers/CSMs), and Partner channels
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Build frameworks for measuring customer outcomes: time-to-value, adoption velocity, production deployment milestones, and business transformation ROI
Establish Commercial and Operational Rigor
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Define engagement scoping, pricing, and commercial models for FDE services (balancing value capture with strategic investment)
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Resolve IP ownership frameworks and contractual considerations for co-developed solutions (e.g., JPMC precedent)
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Build capacity planning models to allocate scarce FDE resources against competing customer priorities
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Create executive visibility through QBRs showcasing FDE impact: lighthouse customer wins, reference architectures, and measured business outcomes
You may be a good fit if you have:
Leadership & Team Building
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10+ years in technical roles with 5+ years leading engineering or solutions teams through hypergrowth
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Experience building 0→1 organizations or new service lines within existing companies
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Proven ability to attract, develop, and retain senior technical talent in competitive markets
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Understanding of enterprise software deployment, API integration patterns, and SDLC tooling
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Knowledge of AI/ML systems, LLMs, or developer tooling
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History of embedding with customer engineering teams to deliver complex technical solutions
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Comfortable whiteboarding system architectures, debugging production issues, and reviewing code alongside your team
Commercial & Strategic Acumen
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Experience defining professional services offerings, engagement models, and pricing strategies
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Ability to balance customer success investment with revenue accountability and margin discipline
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Track record navigating complex enterprise sales cycles, particularly with Fortune 500 accounts
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Skill in cross-functional leadership: you've aligned Sales, Product, Engineering, and CS organizations around common goals
Why This Role Matters
You'll be building the team that proves Claude can drive transformational business outcomes in the world's most complex enterprises. Every engagement creates referenceable customer success stories, informs product development, and establishes patterns that scale across our customer base. This is a rare opportunity to shape how AI adoption happens at Fortune 500 scale.
Logistics & Compensation
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Travel: Expect 30-40% travel to customer sites and team locations
The expected base compensation for this position is below. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation.
Logistics
Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.
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.
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