Founding Sales Engineer

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

3–6 years in pre-sales engineering, solutions architecture, or a forward-deployed / customer-facing engineering role — at a GPU cloud, inference provider, MLOps platform, AI/developer tooling company, or cloud infrastructure vendor

Genuinely hands-on: you write Python comfortably and build your own demos rather than requesting them

Working knowledge of modern LLM inference — serving stacks (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM or similar), OpenAI-compatible APIs, quantization, LoRA and fine-tune serving, batching and KV cache behavior, and what actually drives tokens/sec and cost

Practical familiarity with the open-model ecosystem: Hugging Face, the major open weight families, and how teams evaluate one model against another

Comfortable with containers, Kubernetes, and cloud networking and security fundamentals

Credible with both audiences in the same meeting — the ML engineer who wants the numbers and the CTO who wants the risk and cost story

Strong written communication: your benchmark writeups and architecture docs should be good enough to forward to a buyer's CEO

Entrepreneurial and self-directed — comfortable being the first SE, with no playbook and no one to escalate the technical answer to

Use AI tools heavily in your own workflow to research, prototype, and move faster

Nice to have: experience selling or building on AMD GPUs / ROCm; exposure to enterprise security and compliance review; open-source contributions or public technical writing; experience as the first technical hire on a GTM team.

Build the sales engineering function at a company in one of the fastest-moving spaces in AI

Work as a true pair with the founding AE, and directly with the CRO and founders — small team, no layers, immediate impact

Real technical depth: 40,000+ open models and an in-house research team shipping inference and optimization work you'll get to sell

Be part of a small, high-performing team making open weight AI accessible to everyone

Competitive base + variable tied to the team's number, plus equity