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.

Responsibilities

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 …