Pre-Sales Program Lead, Forward Deployed Engineering

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

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.

What it asks for · 8

• 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 procurement stakeholders to get agreements signed
• Have designed program, playbooks, or cadences that other people actually adopted and ran — not only documented
• 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
• Communicate clearly and credibly with audiences from engineers to executives, and can influence without authority across functions
• Work effectively in high-ambiguity environments and are comfortable building where no process exists yet
• Are excited about Anthropic's mission to develop AI that is safe and beneficial

Also a plus

• 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 in AI or technical professional services, with enough technical fluency to reason about what modern AI products make possible
• Experience standing up pre-sales tooling and systems, including CRM, proposal and approval workflows
• Extensive experience in deal operations, revenue programs, or services go-to-market at a high-growth technology company

What the job covers

• 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

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• programs11×
• deal7×
• pre-sales7×
• build5×
• partner5×
• qualification5×
• services5×
• signed5×
• delivery4×
• experience4×
• finance4×
• function4×
• lead4×
• legal4×
• pipeline4×
• portfolio4×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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