Head of Technical Training & Instructor Excellence

EngineersOfAI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Anthropic is seeking a senior technical instruction leader to build and scale its instruction function. The role focuses on hands-on teaching, developing a bench of instructors, and establishing standards for readiness and quality.

You will be the first full-time instructional leader, spending the first year teaching engineers and other practitioners, then expanding the program with clear processes and scalable practices.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant professional experience across software engineering, solutions engineering, developer advocacy, technical education, or related technical roles.
• 4+ years of hands-on technical instruction: You have taught engineers in live, hands-on settings, across different audience sizes and levels of technical depth.

Responsibilities

• Lead hands-on technical instruction across onboarding and residency programs, from small labs to large field-readiness days.
• Build the instructor bench: hire, onboard, manage, and develop technical instructors; run hiring loops and set performance expectations.
• Set the quality bar: define excellence in technical instruction and maintain rubrics and clearance processes.
• Scale through certification: run train-the-trainer programs and certify instructors to meet delivery standards.
• Turn expertise into great instruction: collaborate with enablement teams to convert content into labs and exercises for live rooms.
• Enable programs without owning them: staff programs with cleared instructors and ensure instruction quality.
• Measure and improve: establish learner outcome metrics and act on results.

Job description

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

The world's engineers want to get the most out of Claude. At Anthropic, technical instruction already happens everywhere: our Applied AI and Forward Deployed Engineering teams teach customers and partners, and engineers across the company help others learn to build with Claude. Today that instruction is a shared responsibility, delivered alongside people's primary roles. As demand grows, we need to turn that distributed expertise into a dedicated technical instruction function.

You will build that function.

You will be the first person at Anthropic whose full-time job is technical instruction. You'll spend your first year primarily in the classroom teaching engineers, architects, and other technical practitioners. You'll also build the people, standards, and systems that let Anthropic's technical instruction scale far beyond the people we directly employ.

This is a player-coach role. From day one you manage a small bench of instructors. You set the bar for what "ready to teach" means, decide who is cleared to teach a given module in Anthropic's technical programs, and assess facilitators from our training partners against that bar.

You're an engineer who teaches and a teacher who has led other teachers. You can build an agent live in front of a skeptical engineer, diagnose what isn't working in a technical lab, and make the material better. You can also watch an experienced instructor teach, tell them their session isn't ready yet, and coach them to get there.

You will report to the Head of Technical Enablement. The role is based in San Francisco with some travel expected.

Key responsibilities

• Lead from the front. Teach hands-on sessions to new Applied AI engineers, our field teams, and partner cohorts, in rooms from 12-person labs to 100-person training days.
• Build the instructor bench. Hire and develop instructors and curriculum developers. Decide contract renewals, and recommend conversions to full-time, against criteria you define.
• Set the quality bar. Own the observation rubric, dry-run protocol, and cleared-to-teach process for every instructor-led technical session.
• Scale through train-the-trainer. Set the bar the Lead Technical Instructor's train-the-trainer program teaches to, for internal experts, contract instructors, and partner facilitators.
• Turn expertise into instruction. Turn internal experts' content into sessions and labs that work in a live room.
• Enable programs without owning them. Staff other teams' programs with cleared instructors, and own the quality of instruction inside them.
• Measure and improve. Report learner pass rates per instructor each month, and act on them.

Minimum qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant professional experience across software engineering, solutions engineering, developer advocacy, technical education, or related technical roles.
• 4+ years of hands-on technical instruction. You have taught engineers live and hands-on, across audience sizes.
• Production engineering. You have written and shipped production software and engage credibly with experienced engineers on architecture and debugging.
• Recent hands-on AI development. In your last three years of work, you have built or debugged applications with LLM APIs, agent frameworks, tool use, MCP, or similar.
• People leadership. You have managed instructors, trainers, developer advocates, or solutions engineers, including hiring and performance management, and kept teaching.
• Instructor development. You have designed or run a train-the-trainer program, instructor certification, or observation framework.