About the role

Founding Sales Engineer proving Featherless.ai’s open-model inference platform through demos, benchmarks, and POCs. Building the technical sales function for North American customers.

Responsibilities

Partner with the founding Account Executive as the named technical owner on every active North American opportunity
Run technical discovery covering models, workloads, latency and throughput targets, spend, and constraints
Design and drive proofs of concept and benchmarks against incumbent solutions
Build the demo environment and reusable technical collateral
Own technical objection handling for performance, reliability, cost modeling, security, and data handling
Lead architecture reviews, live demos, and working-code sessions tailored to buyers' stacks
Build migration paths from closed-model APIs to open weights
Run benchmarks and produce throughput, latency, and cost-per-token analyses
Scope and execute POCs with clear technical success criteria
Write technical sections of proposals, RFP responses, and security questionnaires
Support onboarding and first production workloads, then hand off and remain available for expansion
Provide structured field feedback to product and engineering
Build demo apps, notebooks, reference architectures, integration guides, and internal enablement
Represent Featherless technically at conferences, meetups, and developer events
Keep POC and technical-stage details current in HubSpot

3–6 years in pre-sales engineering, solutions architecture, or a forward-deployed / customer-facing engineering role
Experience at a GPU cloud, inference provider, MLOps platform, AI/developer tooling company, or cloud infrastructure vendor
Comfortable writing Python and building demos
Working knowledge of modern LLM inference, including vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM or similar, OpenAI-compatible APIs, quantization, LoRA, fine-tune serving, batching, KV cache behavior, tokens/sec, and cost drivers
Practical familiarity with Hugging Face, major open-weight model families, and model evaluation
Comfortable with containers, Kubernetes, and cloud networking and security fundamentals
Ability to communicate credibly with ML engineers and CTOs
Strong written communication for benchmark writeups and architecture documentation
Entrepreneurial and self-directed
Heavy use of AI tools for research, prototyping, and workflow acceleration
Nice to have: AMD GPUs / ROCm, enterprise security and compliance review, open-source contributions or public technical writing, or experience as the first technical hire on a GTM team
Legally authorized to work in the required location without employer visa sponsorship

Competitive base salary plus variable compensation tied to the team's number
Equity
Direct collaboration with the founding AE, CRO, and founders
Immediate impact in a small team with no layers
Access to 40,000+ open models and an in-house research team
Opportunity to build the sales engineering function
Opportunity to represent Featherless at conferences, meetups, and developer events