Founding Sales Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States, +13 more locations.

📋 Description

• Collaborate with the founding Account Executive as the designated technical lead on active opportunities in North America.

• Conduct technical discovery sessions addressing models, workloads, latency, throughput, expenditures, and constraints.

• Design and execute proofs of concept and benchmarks against existing solutions.

• Develop the demonstration environment and create reusable technical materials.

• Manage technical objection resolution related to performance, reliability, cost modeling, security, and data management.

• Lead architecture evaluations, live demonstrations, and working code sessions.

• Create migration strategies for transitioning from closed-model APIs to open weights.

• Conduct benchmarks and generate analyses on throughput, latency, and cost per token.

• Define and implement POCs with specific technical success criteria.

• Draft technical components of proposals, RFP responses, and security questionnaires.

• Assist with onboarding and initial production workloads, then transition responsibilities while remaining available for further expansion.

• Provide organized field feedback to product and engineering teams.

• Develop demo applications, notebooks, reference architectures, integration guides, and internal training materials.

• Represent Featherless at conferences, meetups, and developer events.

• Maintain up-to-date POC and technical-stage information in HubSpot.

⛳️ Requirements

• 3–6 years of experience in pre-sales engineering, solutions architecture, or a customer-facing engineering role within a forward-deployed context.

• Background in a GPU cloud, inference provider, MLOps platform, AI/developer tooling company, or cloud infrastructure vendor.

• Proficient in writing Python and developing demonstrations.

• Familiarity with modern LLM inference, including vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, or similar technologies, OpenAI-compatible APIs, quantization, LoRA, fine-tuning serving, batching, KV cache behavior, tokens per second, and cost drivers.

• Practical knowledge of Hugging Face and major open-weight model families.

• Experience in evaluating one model against another.

• Comfortable working with containers, Kubernetes, cloud networking, and security basics.

• Ability to communicate effectively with ML engineers and CTOs.

• Strong written communication skills for benchmark reports and architectural documentation.

• Self-directed and entrepreneurial mindset.

• High utilization of AI tools for research, prototyping, and workflow enhancement.

• Nice to have: experience with AMD GPUs / ROCm.

• Nice to have: exposure to enterprise security and compliance assessments.

• Nice to have: contributions to open-source projects or public technical writing.

• Nice to have: experience as the first technical hire on a go-to-market team.

• Must possess legal authorization to work in the required job location without employer visa sponsorship.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive base salary plus variable compensation tied to team performance.

• Equity options available.

• Direct collaboration with the CRO and founders.

• Small team structure, minimal hierarchy, immediate impact.

• Access to significant technical resources: over 40,000 open models and an in-house research team.

• Opportunity to develop the sales engineering function.

• Chance to represent Featherless at conferences, meetups, and developer events.