Manager, Applied AI Architect

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