Manager of Applied AI Architecture, Startups

About the role

The Manager of Startups Applied AI Architects at Anthropic will lead a team of technical architects to help startups build AI-native products with the Claude Developer Platform. The role involves driving adoption of frontier AI, earning the trust of founders and engineers, and scaling technical partnerships.

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

Qualifications

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Fluent in the LLM frameworks, tools, and integration patterns common in startup engineering stacks

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

• Visible technical presence in the startup or AI engineering community through conference talks, written content, or open-source contributions

Benefits

Annual Salary: $315,000 - $380,000 USD

Requirements

• 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

Logistics

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.