Manager of Applied AI Architecture, Startups
San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY · New York City, NY · San Francisco · USD 315,000-380,000 / year · 5+ years experience · Hybrid · Posted Sep 22, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 5+ years experience
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY · New York City, NY · San Francisco
- Salary
- USD 315,000-380,000 / year · Base salary
- Visa sponsorship
- Visa sponsorship available
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.
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
Requirements
- 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
Preferred qualifications
- 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
Benefits
- competitive compensation
- benefits
- optional equity donation matching
- generous vacation
- parental leave
- flexible working hours
- lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues
Workplace
- Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time.
Skills
- Python
- LLM Frameworks
- Context Engineering
- Eval Frameworks
- Agentic Architectures
- Developer Tooling
- Claude Developer Platform
- Claude API
