Lead Sales Engineer

Quick Facts

• Role: Lead Sales Engineer (player-coach)

• Focus: AI inference platform for latency- and cost-sensitive LLM workloads

• Location: Remote (United States)

Description

You will lead and develop the Sales Engineering function while staying deeply involved in the most strategic and technically complex customer engagements. This player-coach role sets technical standards for discovery, PoC qualification, and production readiness, and provides architectural leadership to improve revenue quality and PoC-to-production conversion.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing Sales Engineering team

• Establish consistent engagement mechanisms: discovery, architecture reviews, PoC qualification, and production readiness

• Allocate Sales Engineering capacity based on strategic value, technical complexity, and probability of success

• Act as the senior technical advisor on strategic and complex customer opportunities

• Translate customer ambitions into production-feasible architectures and identify hidden technical, operational, and economic risks early

• Partner with Sales leadership on strategic deals, account planning, and technical qualification

• Define measurable PoC success criteria (latency, TTFT, throughput, reliability, cost envelope) and run Go/No-Go decisions

• Prevent uncontrolled customization and poorly scoped engineering commitments

• Recognize recurring patterns across customer engagements and leverage them to influence platform priorities

• Coordinate cross-function feedback loops across Sales, Sales Engineering, Product, and Engineering

Requirements

• Deep understanding of AI inference systems and GPU-backed infrastructure

• Significant experience with LLM workloads in performance-sensitive environments

• Experience with inference frameworks and libraries: vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM

• Strong ability to reason about latency, throughput, GPU utilization, cost, and architecture tradeoffs

• Experience leading, mentoring, or managing Sales Engineers or similar customer-facing technical teams

• Demonstrated success supporting complex enterprise or developer-focused technical sales cycles

• Strong customer presence with engineering-first organizations

• Ability to operate credibly with technical founders, engineering leaders, and senior stakeholders

• Strong judgment on when to standardize vs. customize

• Comfort challenging assumptions constructively with customers and internal stakeholders

• Commercial awareness of engineering time and GPU capacity as strategic resources

• Ability to move between technical depth, deal strategy, team leadership, and executive communication

• Experience building repeatable processes and technical standards in a fast-growing organization

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits packages

• Career growth and learning opportunities

• Flexibility and ownership

• Collaborative and innovative culture

• Opportunity to work on impactful AI projects

• International environment and talented teams

Pay Transparency

Base compensation range: $228,000—$285,000 USD