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