Founding Sales Engineer
Featherless AI · Remote · Remote (US & Canada) · Atlanta · Tampa · Miami · Orlando · Ottawa · New York City · Salt Lake City · Nashville · Ashburn · Austin · Montreal · Toronto · Halifax · Charlotte · Seattle · Dallas-Fort Worth · Fairfax · Boston · Raleigh · Washington · ·
COMPENSATION
$150k – $190k
Listed on the employer's job board (Ashby)
- Founding Sales Engineer
- Fully remote (North America)
- Python + LLM Inference
- Build GTM technical function
- Equity + Competitive Base
As the first Sales Engineer at Featherless.ai, you will define the technical sales function while supporting active opportunities in North America. You work hands-on with prospects to demonstrate how open-source AI models on our platform outperform incumbent solutions in speed, cost, and reliability.
This role requires building demo environments, creating technical collateral, and guiding customers from initial discovery through production rollout. You serve as the bridge between field requirements and product engineering, ensuring technical objections are resolved with data and code.
What you'll do
- Partner with the founding AE as the technical owner for North American opportunities
- Conduct technical discovery to map prospect workloads, latency targets, and constraints
- Design and execute POCs and benchmarks against closed-model APIs or self-managed GPUs
- Build reusable demo environments and technical collateral for the GTM team
- Handle technical objections regarding performance, reliability, cost, and security
- Lead architecture reviews, live demos, and coding sessions tailored to buyer stacks
- Create migration paths from closed-model APIs to open weights with parity checks
- Write technical proposals, RFP responses, and maintain a reusable answer library
- Support onboarding of first production workloads and assist with expansion
- Provide structured field feedback to product and engineering teams
- Represent Featherless technically at conferences and developer events
- Maintain accurate POC and technical-stage details in HubSpot for forecasting
What you'll need
- 3–6 years in pre-sales, solutions architecture, or customer-facing engineering
- Experience at a GPU cloud, inference provider, MLOps platform, or cloud vendor
- Proficient in Python with ability to build custom demos independently
- Knowledge of LLM inference stacks like vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM
- Familiarity with OpenAI-compatible APIs, quantization, LoRA, and KV cache
- Understanding of the open-model ecosystem including Hugging Face and weight families
- Comfortable with containers, Kubernetes, and cloud networking fundamentals
- Ability to communicate effectively with both ML engineers and CTOs
- Strong written communication skills for benchmark writeups and architecture docs
- Self-directed and entrepreneurial, comfortable working without an existing playbook
- Heavy user of AI tools for research, prototyping, and workflow efficiency
Nice to have
- Experience selling or building on AMD GPUs and ROCm
- Exposure to enterprise security and compliance reviews
- Open-source contributions or public technical writing
- Experience as the first technical hire on a GTM team
Stack
- Python
- vLLM
- SGLang
- TensorRT-LLM
- Hugging Face
- Kubernetes
- HubSpot
How you'll work
- Remote role focused on North America
- Pair directly with founding Account Executive
- Small team with no management layers
- Direct access to CRO and founders
What you get
- Competitive base salary
- Variable compensation tied to team performance
- Equity package
- Build the sales engineering function from scratch
- Access to 40,000+ open-source AI models
- Work with in-house research team innovations