Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

About AnthropicAnthropic’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 building the team to help the world's most ambitious organizations adopt Claude in ways that are transformative, safe, and lasting. Our Forward Deployed Engineers embed directly with strategic customers to ship production AI applications that solve real business problems. As this practice grows, we need a founding leader to build and scale it. As the first FDE Manager in DACH, you'll own the team that sits at the frontier of enterprise AI deployment. You'll hire and develop a high-performing team of FDEs, set the technical and operational bar for customer engagements, and build the playbooks that turn one-off successes into repeatable patterns. You'll work hand-in-hand with Engagement Managers who own delivery logistics and stakeholder management, while you ensure your team is shipping quality code, growing technically, and representing Anthropic at the highest level in customer environments. This is a player-coach role with a strong bias toward leadership. You'll stay close enough to the technical work to review architectures, debug production issues, and pair with your team when it matters. You'll partner cross-functionally with Sales, Product, and Engineering to shape how Anthropic serves its most strategic customers, and your team's field insights will directly influence product direction.

Responsibilities

• Hire, develop, and retain a world-class team of Forward Deployed Engineers. Set a high bar for technical talent and customer instincts.

• Conduct regular 1:1s, provide technical mentorship, and invest in the career growth of each team member.

• Staff and oversee customer engagements across your team's portfolio, balancing customer needs, team development, and business priorities.

• Collaborate with account teams and Engagement Managers during the pre-sales process to qualify engagements, scope work, and inform statements of work.

• Review technical architectures and code produced by your FDEs, ensuring the team ships high-quality, production-ready solutions.

• Stay hands-on enough to lead technical discovery sessions, prototype solutions, and debug complex issues alongside your team when needed.

• Build repeatable playbooks, starter repositories, integration templates, and an internal knowledge base that captures field learnings.

• Define team OKRs tied to customer success outcomes and product adoption goals, and establish operational cadences.

• Partner with Product and Engineering to translate field insights into product improvements and serve as the voice of the customer.

• Travel to customer sites as needed (25-50%), particularly during engagement kickoffs and for high-priority accounts.

You may be a good fit if you have

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, solutions architecture, or a technical customer-facing role such as forward deployed engineering or consulting.

• 2+ years of people management experience within a services, post-sales, or FDE organization.

• Experience building organizations from 0 to 1, not just inheriting an existing one.

• Experience working directly with enterprise customers on technical implementations, including comfort navigating complex organizational dynamics.

• Executive presence with the ability to move fluidly between strategic conversations with senior stakeholders and hands-on debugging sessions.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills to translate technical complexity into clear narratives.

• Genuine excitement about building something new and defining what great looks like for a team that doesn't yet exist.

Logistics

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and experience.

• Location-based hybrid policy: Staff are expected to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time.

• Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas and retain an immigration lawyer to help with this process.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. We strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.