Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering
Job description
Founding FDE Manager in DACH to build and scale Anthropic's Forward Deployed Engineering team, hiring and developing engineers who embed with strategic enterprise customers to ship production AI applications. A player-coach role with a strong bias toward leadership, defining what good FDE management looks like from zero to one.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time · Employee (employment agreement)
- Work mode
- Hybrid · Germany
What you'll do
- Hire, develop, and retain a world-class team of Forward Deployed Engineers. Set a high bar for technical talent and customer instincts.
- Conduct regular 1:1s, provide technical mentorship, and invest in the career growth of each team member. Create an environment where FDEs do the best work of their careers.
- Staff and oversee customer engagements across your team's portfolio, making resource allocation decisions that balance customer needs, team development, and business priorities.
- Collaborate with account teams and Engagement Managers during the pre-sales process to qualify engagements, scope work, and inform statements of work.
- Review technical architectures and code produced by your FDEs, ensuring the team ships high-quality, production-ready solutions that solve real customer problems.
- Stay hands-on enough to lead technical discovery sessions, prototype solutions, and debug complex issues alongside your team when needed.
- Build repeatable playbooks, starter repositories, integration templates, and an internal knowledge base that captures what your team learns in the field.
- Define team OKRs that tie to customer success outcomes and product adoption goals. Create operational cadences — standups, retros, engagement reviews — that keep the team aligned.
- Partner with Product and Engineering to translate field insights into product improvements. Serve as the voice of the customer in internal planning.
- Travel to customer sites as needed (25-50%), particularly during engagement kickoffs and for your team's highest-priority accounts.
What we're looking for
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, solutions architecture, or a technical customer-facing role such as forward deployed engineering or consulting.
- 2+ years of people management experience within a services/post-sales/FDE organization with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers.
- Experience building organizations from 0->1, not just inheriting an existing one.
- Experience working directly with enterprise customers on technical implementations, including comfort navigating complex organizational dynamics.
- Executive presence with the ability to move fluidly between strategic conversations with senior stakeholders and hands-on debugging sessions with engineers.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills. You can translate technical complexity into clear narratives for diverse audiences.
- Genuine excitement about building something new and defining what great looks like for a team that doesn't yet exist.
- 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.
Your team
Forward Deployed Engineering (DACH)
A team that embeds directly with strategic customers to ship production AI applications that solve real business problems; this role is its first FDE Manager in DACH.
Benefits
Visa sponsorship (we do sponsor visas; we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this)
- Competitive compensation and benefits
- Optional equity donation matching
- Generous vacation and parental leave
- Flexible working hours
- Lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues
Apply
Direct apply at anthropic
Opens the job posting at anthropic
About Anthropic
Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems. We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science, working as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts.
Mission
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.
Key facts
- San Francisco
- Public benefit corporation
- We do sponsor visas
- Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time
- We retain an immigration lawyer to help with visas
What they value
- Impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI
- Communication skills
- Responsible development of frontier AI systems