Technical Deployment Lead
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 Technical Deployment Lead on the Forward Deployed Engineering team, you will lead the delivery of custom agentic AI solutions for enterprise customers. You'll own high-value engagements where we collaborate directly with customers to build and deploy agents into their most critical business processes.
Each engagement runs from SOW through production deployment. Forward Deployed Engineers build the technical solution; you drive the delivery plan, product scoping, stakeholder relationships, and the organizational complexity of deploying agents into complex enterprise environments.
You need to be credible in architecture conversations with engineering leads and equally comfortable running executive briefings with C-suite sponsors. You won't write production code, but you'll pressure-test technical decisions and make real-time trade-offs on scope and priority when things go sideways on an engagement.
This is also a builder's role. We're in the early innings of an emerging motion - the playbooks, the delivery patterns, the repeatable IP that makes the next engagement faster and better don't exist yet. The TDLs who thrive here are the ones who get that codifying what works is as important as the engagement in front of them right now.
Responsibilities
- Own the technical delivery plan for each engagement. Work from the signed SOW to a sequenced roadmap with clear milestones, dependencies, success criteria, and value hypotheses that FDEs execute against.
- Lead delivery discovery. Map customer workflows and constraints in depth, pressure-test the scoped MVP against what you find, and shape the solution architecture with the FDEs.
- Run day-to-day engineering execution. Drive delivery across Anthropic and customer teams. Keep progress unblocked and sequenced. Make real-time trade-offs on scope and priority to protect the critical path.
- Own product scoping during delivery. Author requirements, prioritize the engineering backlog, manage scope against success criteria, and hold the bar for what good looks like for the people and enterprises who will use the product.
- Own the customer relationship throughout delivery. Lead executive briefings, manage stakeholder communications across technical leads and procurement, and represent Anthropic's technical credibility with senior business and engineering leaders.
- Own value measurement and ROI. Define impact hypotheses, set baselines and KPIs, run pre- and post-deployment measurement, and report outcomes to executive sponsors.
- Contribute reusable delivery patterns. Capture what works on your engagements and feed field signal to the Programs Leads, Product, and Research.
- Navigate enterprise and regulatory complexity. Security reviews, legal approvals, procurement processes, compliance requirements, and organizational dynamics.
- Manage scope and change. Handle evolving requirements, set expectations, negotiate contract modifications, identify risks early, and escalate with clear context when needed.
- Run engagement-level delivery operations: sprint ceremonies, milestone reviews, and engagement reporting that feed the team's post-sales cadence and dashboards.
- Travel to customer sites. Build relationships, unblock delivery, and accelerate adoption. (up to 25–50% travel expected).
You May Be a Good Fit If You
- Have led AI/ML engagements/deployments, whether as a founder, data scientist, engineer, researcher, or in a professional services or consulting role.
- Operate like the CEO of your engagement. You take initiative without a mandate, make decisions with incomplete information, and lead rather than wait for instructions.
- Have delivered AI, ML, or LLM-based agentic solutions into production. You understand solution patterns, integration approaches, and what breaks in real environments.
- Have experience in a specialized vertical (life sciences, pharmaceutical, retail, mining, agriculture, etc.).
- Can navigate architecture discussions with engineering stakeholders, evaluate technical trade-offs, and pressure-test technical decisions. You won't write production code, but you will own the technical direction of engagements alongside FDEs.
- Have a track record delivering complex, high-stakes technical projects for enterprise clients where outcomes depended on tight coordination and fast decision-making - ideally across multiple workstreams in regulated industries.
- Have executive presence - polished, credible, and comfortable representing Anthropic to senior leaders in high-stakes environments.
- Thrive in ambiguity and bring structure where none exists.
- Have a builder's mindset - you're here to create a function, not just join one.
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.
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.
Benefits & Perks
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.
