Pre-Sales Program Lead (Forward Deployed Engineering)

• We’re looking for our first Pre-Sales Program Lead to build the programs that take this team from opportunity to a signed contract
• Your job will be to build the pipeline qualification and management mechanisms that keep quality opportunities flowing, the prioritization heuristics that decide where a capacity-constrained team places its bets across commercial, research, and mission-oriented deals, the pursuit-to-signature process (including the legal and finance ways of working) that gets contracts signed quickly and cleanly, and the partner coordination motions that determine when we pass an opportunity to a partner, when we team, and how we run subcontract or co-delivery pursuits well
• This is a foundational role; you’ll be the first hire in this function, operating with high autonomy and in direct partnership with Forward Deployed Engineering leadership, with room for the role to grow as the function does
• You’ll work hand in glove with a Post-Sale Program Lead counterpart who owns delivery from signature onward
• Together you’ll define the handoff that connects your two halves of the engagement lifecycle
• The right person finds energy in exactly this: a business with more demand than it can serve, and no machine yet for choosing well and closing fast
• Design, pilot and refine the pre-sales programs that run Forward Deployed Engineering’s pipeline: how opportunities are generated, qualified, routed, pursued, and won across a high-velocity portfolio
• Own the prioritization heuristics that shape the portfolio, making deliberate trade-offs across commercial, research, and mission-oriented engagements and making those trade-offs legible to leadership
• Lead the most complex and high-stakes pre-sales pursuits personally — the ones where deal size, organizational complexity, or strategic sensitivity puts a senior operator in the room — while simultaneously building the programs that let a growing team handle everything else
• Own definition of the pursuit-to-signature process: scoping, proposal development, approvals, and the legal and finance workflows that get contracts signed without cutting corners
• Build the partner coordination motions for pre-sales: when to hand an opportunity to a partner, when to team, and how to run subcontract or co-delivery pursuits with tight management
• Define the process for handing off deals from sales to delivery, working closely with the Post-Sale Programs Lead so signed engagements arrive with what delivery teams need to start fast
• Stand up the metrics, dashboards, and reporting that measure pipeline health, conversion, cycle time, and portfolio mix and use them to drive continuous improvement
• Codify how the team pursues work into playbooks and self-service programs that let a growing organization run without bottlenecking on individual people
• Build Claude into proposals, deal qualification, and pipeline tracking, setting the bar for what AI-native looks like
• Partner across Sales, Partnerships, Legal, Finance, and Product to keep Forward Deployed Engineering’s pre-sales interfaces with the rest of the business clean and predictable

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents
• Inclusive fertility benefits via Carrot Fertility
• 22 weeks of paid parental leave
• Flexible paid time off and absence policies
• Mental health support for you and your dependents
• Competitive salary and equity packages
• Optional equity donation matching at a 1:1 ratio, up to 25% of your equity grant
• Retirement plans with competitive matching
• Life and income protection plans
• $500/month flexible wellness and time saver stipend
• Commuter benefits
• Annual education stipend
• Home office stipends
• Relocation support for those moving for Anthropic
• Daily meals and snacks in the office- Bring a strong analytical toolkit: you’re fluent working with data, have stood up metrics and reporting from scratch, and use them to drive decisions
• Have designed program, playbooks, or cadences that other people actually adopted and ran — not only documented
• Work effectively in high-ambiguity environments and are comfortable building where no process exists yet
• Have built or scaled the pre-sales side of a services or delivery business — professional services, consulting, solutions or field engineering, or similar — owning qualification, prioritization, and forecasting across a portfolio of concurrent pursuits
• Have taken complex deals through contracting, working with legal, finance, and procurement stakeholders to get agreements signed
• Are excited about Anthropic’s mission to develop AI that is safe and beneficial
• Communicate clearly and credibly with audiences from engineers to executives, and can influence without authority across functions
• Bring enough technical fluency to scope and defend AI and software services work with engineering leaders and technical buyers, without being the one who builds it
• 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
• We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification
• Experience with partner-involved deal motions, including subcontracting, co-delivery, teaming, or channel handoffs
• Have been the first programs or operations hire, or built such a function from scratch, at a company that scaled significantly during your tenure
• Have hired, developed, and led programs or operations teams
• Experience standing up pre-sales tooling and systems, including CRM, proposal and approval workflows
• Experience in AI or technical professional services, with enough technical fluency to reason about what modern AI products make possible
• Extensive experience in deal operations, revenue programs, or services go-to-market at a high-growth technology company