Job detail for Public Sector Sales Lead

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 Anthropic's Public Sector Sales Lead for France, you will be the face of Anthropic to the French State. This is a founding, zero-to-one role: there is no public sector team in France today, and you will build our strategy, our routes to market and our first strategic relationships from the ground up. Reporting to our EMEA South leadership, you will lead the adoption of safe, frontier AI across central government, starting with the largest ministries. You will work hand in hand with our Public Policy lead in Paris, because in few companies is policy as central to the mission as it is at Anthropic, and with Partnerships, Legal, Security and Product to put in place the commercial and compliance frameworks the State needs in order to work with us at scale.

This is a senior individual contributor role. We expect you to have run a public sector business and led teams, and to be energised by stepping back into a hands-on seat where you build it yourself and where the size of your team says nothing about the size of your scope. In the first year, success is measured less by a large number and more by putting Anthropic on the map with the French State: a clear strategy, the right foundations and our first strategic agreements.

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• Define and own Anthropic's public sector go-to-market strategy for France: where we play first, how we win, and what we need to build to get there
• Be the senior face of Anthropic to the French State, building trusted relationships with ministerial cabinets, senior officials and digital and technology leaders across the largest ministries, including defence, finance and justice
• Own the full sales cycle on our first strategic public sector opportunities, from first engagement through procurement route, close, deployment and expansion
• Work with Partnerships, Legal and Finance to put in place the routes to market the State needs, including resale and partner channels, framework agreements and central purchasing bodies such as UGAP
• Partner day to day with our Public Policy lead in France so that commercial and policy engagement reinforce each other, and stay aligned with French and European AI strategy and regulation
• Lead the conversation with customers on data sovereignty, security and compliance (for example SecNumCloud and the State's cloud doctrine), and work with Security, Legal and Product on how we meet those requirements
• Prove value with customers alongside a shared Applied AI architect, cloud providers and systems integrators, doing much of the groundwork yourself in the early stages
• Learn from and contribute to our UK and US public sector teams, bringing what works to France and sharing what you learn
• Create the playbooks, references and operating rhythm that will let us scale a public sector team in France over time

You may be a good fit if you have

• 15+ years in enterprise technology sales, including significant time running a public sector business unit or leading sales teams that sell to French central government
• The appetite to move from a leadership role into a hands-on senior individual contributor role with no team at the outset
• Evidence that you thrive building from zero: a new market, a new business line or an early-stage company, where systems, processes and support were not yet in place
• A track record of landing large, complex and genuinely transformative agreements with major ministries, as the person leading the deal
• A deep, senior network across central government, and the credibility to engage at director and cabinet level as well as with technical teams
• Practical command of French public procurement, including tenders, framework agreements, central purchasing bodies and partner or resale routes
• Real expertise in data sovereignty, security and compliance requirements in the French State, and experience leading those conversations with customers
• Experience of, or a clear aptitude for, working closely with public policy or government affairs colleagues
• Ownership and resilience: you treat what is missing as something to build, and you bring colleagues with you to build it
• The technical curiosity to learn our products in depth and hold credible conversations with both engineering leaders and senior officials
• Fluent French and English, with excellent written and spoken communication in both
• Willingness to go through French security clearance (habilitation) should specific accounts require it
• A genuine commitment to safe and beneficial AI, and the ability to articulate why it matters for public institutions

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

€310.000—€380.000 EUR

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 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 , 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.