Founding Sales Engineer

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Founding Sales Engineer based in United States.** This is a high-impact founding sales role within a fast-growing AI infrastructure environment. You will own the full sales cycle across mid-market and enterprise accounts, from discovery through contract close. The role combines technical depth with consultative selling, engaging CTOs, ML leaders, developers, and infrastructure decision-makers. You will translate complex AI inference requirements into compelling technical demonstrations, proposals, and business cases. As an early member of the go-to-market organization, you will help shape sales processes, acquisition strategies, and expansion playbooks. You’ll work closely with executive leadership, product, engineering, BDR, and developer-relations teams to turn market feedback into growth. This is an entrepreneurial opportunity where your ability to build, execute, and close will directly influence the company’s trajectory. ### Accountabilities - Own full-cycle sales across mid-market and enterprise segments, managing opportunities from initial outreach and discovery through negotiation and signed contracts. - Build and develop a pipeline of high-growth startups and scale-up accounts, establishing relationships with CTOs, ML leaders, developers, and infrastructure decision-makers. - Lead technical discovery and product demonstrations tailored to each prospect’s technology stack, AI workloads, and business requirements. - Develop customized proposals and business cases that clearly connect AI model inference needs with relevant platform capabilities and commercial value. - Navigate complex, multi-stakeholder sales processes, manage objections, negotiate commercial terms, and consistently drive opportunities toward close. - Identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities within existing accounts to expand revenue and strengthen long-term customer relationships. - Partner with the CRO to refine acquisition, sales, and expansion playbooks as the go-to-market organization evolves. - Collaborate with BDR and developer-relations teams to generate qualified pipeline and improve prospecting effectiveness. - Maintain accurate CRM activity, opportunity stages, forecasts, and pipeline reporting in HubSpot. - Use AI-powered tools to streamline account research, personalize outreach, automate workflows, and improve sales productivity. - Represent the organization at industry events and conferences, using these opportunities to generate relationships and advance active deals. - Partner with product and engineering teams to communicate customer feedback, market requirements, and opportunities for product improvement. - Mentor BDRs and help establish effective standards for pipeline generation and qualification. ## Requirements - 3–6 years of experience in a closing sales role within cloud infrastructure, MLOps, AI, developer tooling, or a closely related technical market. - Demonstrated success closing deals with technical buyers, including developers, ML engineers, CTOs, and infrastructure leaders. - Experience managing complex enterprise or multi-stakeholder sales cycles from discovery through negotiation and close. - Strong technical fluency and the ability to understand and communicate sophisticated AI, infrastructure, or developer-tooling concepts credibly. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to be concise, persuasive, technically literate, and executive-ready. - Entrepreneurial mindset with the confidence to build processes, test approaches, and create structure in an evolving environment without relying on an established playbook. - Strong forecasting discipline, CRM hygiene, and a data-driven approach to pipeline and opportunity management. - Familiarity with HubSpot and modern AI-enabled sales and productivity tools such as Clay, Claude, ChatGPT, or equivalent platforms. - Ability to work collaboratively across sales, business development, developer relations, product, engineering, and executive functions. - Strong ownership, adaptability, commercial judgment, and motivation to operate effectively in a high-growth AI environment. ## Benefits - Remote-first position available across the United States and Canada, with additional locations available across major U.S. and Canadian cities. - Competitive total on-target earnings of **$150,000–$190,000 USD**. - Competitive base salary plus commission. - Opportunity to help build and shape the sales function at an early-stage company operating in the rapidly evolving AI infrastructure market. - Direct collaboration with executive leadership, with meaningful influence over sales strategy and company growth. - Opportunity to work with a small, high-performing team focused on expanding access to open-model AI. - Significant autonomy to build sales processes, develop accounts, and define what effective pipeline generation looks like. - Exposure to cutting-edge AI infrastructure, open models, inference technology, and developer tooling. - Opportunities to represent the organization at industry events and conferences.