About this role
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 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.
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 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,