Founding Sales Engineer
About the role
We're hiring our first Sales Engineer to pair directly with our founding Account Executive in North America. You are the technical half of a two-person deal team: the AE owns the commercial motion, you own the technical win. Our buyers are developers, ML engineers, and CTOs, and they don't buy on slides. They buy when someone credible sits with them, looks at their workload, and shows them that open models on Featherless are faster, cheaper, and more reliable than what they're running today. That's your job — hands on keyboard, in the customer's stack, from first technical call through production rollout. Because you're the first SE here, you'll build the function as you go: the demo environment, the POC playbook, the benchmark harness, the security answers, the migration guides. Every deal you win should make the next one easier to win. If you like being the person who can actually answer the hard question in the room — and want the technical foundation of a Series A GTM engine to be yours — this is for you.
Responsibilities
- Partner with the founding AE as the named technical owner on every active opportunity in North America
- Run technical discovery: map each prospect's models, workloads, latency and throughput targets, spend, and constraints
- Design and drive POCs and benchmarks that prove Featherless against the incumbent — closed-model APIs, another inference provider, or self-managed GPUs
- Build the demo environment and reusable technical collateral that the whole GTM team sells with
- Own technical objection handling end-to-end: performance, reliability, cost modeling, security, and data handling
- Be the field's voice into product and engineering — you'll know what we're losing on before anyone else does
- Lead technical calls tailored to each buyer's stack: architecture reviews, live demos, and working code