Manager of Applied AI Architecture, Startups

Anthropic
San Francisco, US
On-siteVisa sponsorship

Who this role is best for

Best suited to technical go-to-market leaders with startup experience who can build and manage high-performing teams in the AI architecture space.

Best fit for

  • Technical leaders who thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
    — “energized by building in ambiguous environments
  • Managers with a track record of developing high-performing SA teams.
    — “strong track record of building and developing high-performing SA teams
  • Candidates with deep startup ecosystem experience and builder credibility.
    — “deep experience working with startups or high-growth technology companies

Things to consider

  • Requires hands-on expertise with LLM frameworks and Python.
    — “comfortable with Python and fluent in the LLM frameworks
  • Must be willing to personally lead high-priority startup engagements.
    — “Personally lead pre-sales engagements with high-priority startup accounts

How to stand out

  • Highlight specific examples of turning early engagements into lasting partnerships.
    — “turn a scrappy early engagement into a lasting technical partnership
  • Showcase your technical presence in the startup or AI community.
    — “visible technical presence in the startup or AI engineering community
  • Demonstrate your ability to define playbooks, not just follow them.
    — “excited to define the playbook, not just run it
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · MediumDecision Impact · TeamLevel · Manager

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • high-performing team
  • technical partnership
  • customer needs shaping
Typical background
technical customer-facing rolespre-sales or technical go-to-market teams

Skills & requirements

Required

Technical CredibilityCustomer ImpactStartup-paced ExecutionLLM Solutions

Preferred

AI Engineering LandscapeAgentic Architectures

Stack & domain

Ai ArchitectureTechnical ArchitectureLlm SolutionsTechnical PartnershipTechnical DevelopmentTechnical EvaluationCustomer-specific Eval FrameworksAgentic ArchitecturesDeveloper ToolingLeadershipTeam DevelopmentCustomer ExperienceBrand RepresentationSalesBusiness PerformanceOperationsComplianceCommunicationProblem-solvingDecision-makingCommunity EngagementMicrosoft Office Suite

About the role

Original posting from Anthropic via Greenhouse

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 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 

Experience building foundational team infrastructure from the ground up: hiring frameworks, onboarding programs, technical playbooks, and coaching systems in a high-growth environment

Deep familiarity with how developer infrastructure procurement evolves from seed through Series B and beyond, and how to adapt your team's approach accordingly

A visible technical presence in the startup or AI engineering community 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.

Annual Salary:$315,000—$380,000 USDLogistics

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 resea

Source: Anthropic careers (Greenhouse)

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