Manager of Applied AI Architecture, Startups
Lead and grow a team of Applied AI Architects helping startups build AI-native products with Claude. Drive technical pre-sales, define playbooks, and partner with sales leadership to scale adoption across the startup ecosystem.
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
- 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
- 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
- Strong track record of building and developing high-performing SA teams — hiring well, coaching effectively, and creating an environment where technical talent grows
- Deep experience working with startups or high-growth technology companies — understanding the velocity, constraints, and culture of early-stage companies
- Genuine builder credibility: built and deployed LLM-powered applications, speak the language of founders and founding engineers
- Hands-on expertise with context engineering, LLM evaluation frameworks, and modern AI architectures
- Comfortable with Python and fluent in the LLM frameworks, tools, and integration patterns common in startup engineering stacks
- Energized by building in ambiguous environments — defining the playbook, thriving in fast-moving contexts where technology and customer segment are evolving rapidly
- Genuine passion for making powerful technology safe and societally beneficial
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience as a technical founder or in a founder-led sales motion
- 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
- Visible technical presence in the startup or AI engineering community through conference talks, written content, or open-source contributions
Compensation & Benefits
- Annual Salary: $315,000 — $380,000 USD (OTE includes base + commissions/bonuses)
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