Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

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 member of the GTM team at Anthropic, you will be a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) who embeds directly with our most strategic customers and leads the technical direction of their AI adoption. Customers bring you in to lead, not only to implement: you decide what should be built, and then make sure it gets built well. You will work with customer teams to ship advanced AI applications that solve real world business problems, and guide the architecture and advisory work that surrounds those builds across an account.

Working closely with our Research, Product, and Engineering teams, you'll combine engineering expertise, an understanding of frontier AI applications, and customer-facing skills to understand customer workflows and develop innovative solutions that address complex business challenges while maintaining our high standards for safety and reliability.

You will sit at the frontier of enterprise AI deployments and help shape our forward-deployed motion as it scales. We expect Staff FDEs to set direction under ambiguity and represent Anthropic at the highest level in customer environments. In this role, you guide architecture and build initiatives across workstreams, working directly with senior technical and business stakeholders and owning outcomes that span an account's roadmap.

You don't need to have shipped agents to production. You do need deep experience building and operating production systems, hands-on time with agents, and the judgment to lead architecture and advisory work with enterprise customers.

Responsibilities

• Own technical strategy for a key account or vertical, in partnership with account and product teams.
• Guide technical architecture and design decisions across multiple concurrent workstreams.
• Lead discovery and advisory engagements independently, shaping scope and technical strategy before a build starts.
• Lead engagements delivered with partners, setting the architecture and the quality bar for work you don't build yourself.
• Review designs and unblock other FDEs on hard technical calls.
• Represent Anthropic to senior technical and business stakeholders, including VPs and C-level, to align on strategy and de-risk delivery.
• Own your engagements end to end: scope the work, sequence it, unblock it, anticipate security and procurement gates, and deliver production systems the customer can operate.
• Work within customer systems to build production applications and agent components with Claude, and hand over systems the customer can run.
• Identify and codify repeatable deployment patterns and contribute insights back to our Product and Engineering teams.
• Build long term relationships with customers and proactively identify new opportunities for AI deployment throughout the lifecycle of an engagement.
• Travel frequently (25%) to customer sites to build in person with customers.
• Be a champion for Anthropic's mission in the field.

You May Be a Good Fit If You Have

• Deep system design and problem decomposition skills: you can walk into a discovery conversation with only a business problem and leave with a defensible technical strategy for a secure, production-ready design inside a complex enterprise environment of legacy systems, with identity and access, and compliance requirements.
• Experience in a senior technical, customer facing role such as Forward Deployed Engineer, or as a Tech Lead with consulting or product experience. Former technical founders are also encouraged to apply.
• A track record as the person a team turns to on ambiguous technical calls, whether through architecture review, pairing, or informal mentorship.
• A track record of directly influencing senior technical and business stakeholders, including VP and C-level, in complex organizations.
• Extensive experience building and operating production systems. Hands-on experience with LLMs and agents is expected. Side projects and prototypes count.
• Strong programming skills with proficiency in Python (and ideally in one or more additional languages like TypeScript, Java, etc), experience shipping production applications, and everyday use of AI coding tools with the judgment to review and steer.
• Experience leading advisory and architecture-review engagements as well as hands-on builds, and running them end to end.
• High agency with an ability to navigate ambiguity present in complex organizations, and the learning velocity to pick up new domains and tools fast.
• Passion for advancing safe, beneficial AI systems through creative technical applications.
• A background in financial services, healthcare/life sciences, or another enterprise vertical are nice to have.

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:$280,000—$320,000 USD

Logistics

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.

For roles performing work in California: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records or criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.

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 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.