Startup Account Executive
AnthropicAbout 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 Startup Account Executive at Anthropic's Bangalore hub, you'll be at the forefront of bringing safe, frontier AI to India's thriving startup ecosystem. You'll partner with some of India's most innovative startups—from fintech unicorns to emerging SaaS pioneers—helping them leverage Claude to transform their businesses. This role combines consultative selling with deep technical understanding, as you'll guide founders and CTOs through their AI transformation journey.
You'll be a trusted advisor to the Indian startup community, understanding the unique challenges of building in India for both domestic and global markets. Working closely with our global GTM, product, and marketing teams, you'll shape how Anthropic serves the rapidly evolving needs of Indian startups while maintaining our commitment to AI safety and reliability.
Responsibilities
Drive Revenue and Market Development
- Build relationships with key stakeholders in India's startup ecosystem, from seed-stage founders to scale-up leadership teams
- Navigate complex sales cycles involving technical decision-makers, often including CTOs, engineering leads, and product heads who deeply understand AI
- Own the complete sales journey from initial outreach through implementation, ensuring successful adoption of Claude across diverse use cases
- Develop market insights specific to Indian startups, understanding unique requirements around cost optimization, scale, and multilingual capabilities
Strategic Partnership Building
- Collaborate with ecosystem partners including accelerators, VCs, and developer communities to expand Anthropic's presence
- Create tailored solutions that address India-specific challenges such as language diversity, infrastructure constraints, and cost sensitivity
- Build bridges between Anthropic's global product team and local market needs, advocating for features that serve Indian developers
Market Intelligence and Product Feedback
- Gather insights from the Indian startup ecosystem to inform product roadmap decisions
- Document use cases unique to Indian markets, from vernacular language processing to solutions for Bharat
- Share learnings with the global team about emerging AI applications in sectors like edtech, healthtech, and agritech
Sales Excellence and Process Development
- Develop playbooks tailored to the Indian startup sales cycle, accounting for factors like fiscal year planning and procurement processes
- Mentor and collaborate with team members to build a world-class sales organization in India
- Drive operational excellence by establishing processes that scale with India's rapid digital growth
You May Be a Good Fit If You Have
Essential Experience
- 5-7 years of B2B sales experience in the Indian startup ecosystem, preferably selling developer tools, APIs, or SaaS products
- Track record of success in consultative selling to technical audiences, with demonstrated ability to exceed targets
- Deep understanding of India's startup landscape, including key players, investors, and market dynamics
- Relationship-building skills with the ability to navigate from technical teams to C-suite executives
Technical and Business Acumen
- Technical fluency to engage with engineering teams on topics including:
- API integration patterns, rate limits, latency requirements, and token optimization strategies
- LLM fundamentals like context windows, prompt engineering best practices, and fine-tuning possibilities
- Common AI/ML use cases such as RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), semantic search, conversational AI, and content generation
- Security and compliance considerations including data privacy, API key management, and SOC2/ISO requirements
- Performance metrics, benchmarks, and evaluation criteria relevant to specific use cases
- Integration approaches with popular tech stacks (Python, Node.js, React, various cloud platforms)
- Cost optimization strategies including caching, batch processing, and efficient prompt design
- While you don't need to code, you should confidently navigate technical discussions, ask intelligent questions about architecture and implementation, and effectively translate between business value and technical requirements
- Experience with consumption-based pricing models and helping startups navigate from proof-of-concept through production scaling
- Understanding of Indian startup dynamics including:
- Typical buying processes from POC to paid pilot to annual contracts
- Budget cycles and procurement processes unique to Indian startups
- The role of technical decision-makers vs business stakeholders
- Common concerns around data residency and compliance
- Ability to work across time zones collaborating with global teams while maintaining local market focus
Personal Attributes
- Entrepreneurial mindset with the ability to thrive in ambiguity and build processes from scratch
- Genuine passion for India's digital transformation and the role AI can play in solving local challenges
- Strong communication skills in English; additional Indian languages are a plus
- Cultural bridge-builder who can translate between global product capabilities and local market needs
- Commitment to responsible AI development and deployment, especially in diverse, complex markets like India
Strong Candidates May Also Have
- Existing relationships within India's startup ecosystem, including founders, VCs, and accelerator networks
- Experience selling to Indian unicorns or high-growth startups in sectors like fintech, e-commerce, or SaaS
- Technical background in engineering or computer science from premier Indian institutions
- Understanding of AI/ML applications in Indian contexts, from voice interfaces to computer vision
- Track record of building new markets or launching products in India
- Community involvement in developer communities, startup events, or tech meetups
What Makes This Role Unique
This is an opportunity to shape how one of the world's leading AI companies serves India's dynamic startup ecosystem. You'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI technology and India's digital revolution, helping startups leverage AI responsibly to solve problems for millions of users. As an early member of our India team, you'll have significant influence on our go-to-market strategy and the opportunity to build something transformative.
Working at Anthropic
We believe in the power of diverse perspectives to build better AI systems. India's rich technical talent and unique market challenges make it a crucial geography for developing AI that works for everyone. You'll be part of a global team committed to building AI systems that are safe, beneficial, and accessible to all.
Note: This position is based in our Bangalore office with a hybrid work arrangement. We welcome applications from candidates across India who are willing to relocate.
The expected base compensation for this position is below. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation.
Logistics
Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.
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.
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