Manager, Applied AI Architect

Location: Tokyo, Japan 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 As a leader of Applied AI Solutions Architecture in Japan, you will drive the adoption of frontier AI by enabling the deployment of Anthropic’s products (Claude for Enterprise, Claude Code, and API) across Japanese enterprises and digital-first organizations. You’ll leverage your technical skills and consultative sales experience to drive positive AI transformation that addresses our customers’ business needs, meets their technical requirements, and provides a high degree of reliability and safety. You’ll lead and grow a Japan Applied AI team as Anthropic’s presence in the market continues to expand. Applied AI comprises Solutions Architects, Product Engineers, and Finetuning Engineers. Working alongside the existing Japan Applied AI leadership, you will scale processes and best practices for the region’s technical pre-sales engagements, help each team member achieve success, high productivity, and career growth, and represent Anthropic as a technical lead on some of its most important partnerships. In collaboration with the Sales, Product, and Engineering teams globally and locally, you’ll help enterprise partners incorporate leading-edge AI systems into their cutting-edge products and platforms. You will employ your excellent communication skills, in both Japanese and English, to explain and demonstrate complex solutions persuasively to technical and non-technical audiences alike. You will play a critical role in identifying opportunities to innovate and differentiate our AI systems, while maintaining our best-in-class safety standards. Responsibilities Lead and grow a team of Applied AI professionals in Tokyo (Solutions Architects and Product Engineers), providing both technical guidance and career development Set goals and reviews for your team, promoting growth and output Partner with the existing Japan Applied AI leadership to align on team structure, coverage, and best practices Work with a handful of the highest-value enterprise customers on their overall AI adoption strategies, focusing on pre-sales technical excellence including use case scoping, technical champion building, and POC execution Partner closely with your aligned GTM leadership to understand customer requirements and co-build GTM strategies to drive adoption for Japanese enterprise customers and partners (including SIers and resellers) Contribute to thought leadership through conference presentations, webinars, and technical content creation Own the technical portions of pre-sales engagements, ensuring your team provides compelling demos and validates enterprise customer ROI from Anthropic products Drive collaboration across cross-functional teams to influence and unify stakeholders at all levels of the organization, including navigating consensus-driven decision-making within Japanese enterprises Travel regularly to customer sites for executive-level sessions, technical workshops, and building relationships Establish a shared vision for creating solutions that enable beneficial and safe AI in technology products Lead the vision, strategy, and execution of innovative solutions that leverage our latest models’ capabilities Stay current with emerging AI/ML trends and the competitive landscape in the Japanese enterprise tech sector You may be a good fit if you have: 7+ years of experience as a Solutions Architect, Sales Engineer, or similar pre-sales technical role 3+ years of technical go-to-market management experience, specifically managing pre-sales teams Native or business-level fluency in Japanese and professional proficiency in English Experience working with Japanese enterprise customers and understanding local business culture and decision-making processes (e.g., ringi/nemawashi, multi-layer stakeholder alignment) Experience with the unique technical requirements and technical procurement processes of Japanese enterprises, including working through SIers and channel partners Deep technical proficiency with enterprise AI deployments, API integrations, and production LLM use cases An organizational mindset and enjoyment of scaling teams in a fast-growing, evolving environment Excellent communication, collaboration, and coaching abilities Comfort with uncertain, ambiguous, and fast-moving environments typical of the tech industry Strong executive presence and the ability to foster deep relationships with technical leaders and engineering teams At least a high-level familiarity with the architecture and operation of large language models and/or ML in general Experience with prompt engineering, LLM evaluation, and architecting AI-powered systems The ability to make ambiguous problems clear and identify core principles that translate across scenarios A passion for making powerful technology safe and societally beneficial Creative thinking about the risks and benefits of new technologies, beyond past checklists and playbooks An active interest in emerging research and industry trends Understanding of developer tooling, SDKs, and technical integration patterns common in enterprise tech companies Logistics 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 Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices. Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this. We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed.  Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team. Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings. How we're different We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills. The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences. Come work with us! Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.