Pre-Sales Program Lead, Forward Deployed Engineering

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 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 yo [... source excerpt omitted ...] 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. Key responsibilities 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 si [... source excerpt omitted ...] er 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 Minimum qualifications 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 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 Have taken complex deals through contracting, working with legal, finance, and