Founding Sales Engineer

About Featherless

Featherless.ai http://Featherless.ai is building the world's most reliable open-model inference platform — a serverless foundation for deploying and scaling AI without infrastructure overhead.

Backed by AMD, Airbus Ventures, 500 Global, Kickstart Ventures, HF0 Residency, Panache Ventures, and Oakseed Ventures, we're a well-funded team of researchers and engineers on a mission to democratize AI through performance and accessibility.

Our cloud provides instant access to 40,000+ open-source AI models and the research innovations powering next-generation efficiency, reliability, and model optimization.

• Build and close a pipeline of scale-up and high-growth startup accounts
• Own deals from first contact through signed contract — discovery, demo, proposal, negotiation, close
• Build and maintain executive-level relationships with CTOs, ML leads, and infrastructure decision-makers
• Work with the CRO to refine acquisition and expansion playbooks
• Partner with BDR and DevRel on pipeline generation
• Maintain CRM rigor and deliver accurate forecasting and pipeline reporting
• Represent Featherless at industry events and conferences to generate and advance deals

Core Responsibilities

• Run full-cycle sales across mid-market and enterprise segments
• Lead high-quality discovery and technical demo calls tailored to each buyer's stack and use case
• Develop custom proposals and business cases that connect model inference needs to Featherless capabilities
• Negotiate and close complex, multi-stakeholder deals
• Expand revenue within existing accounts — identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities
• Use AI tools extensively to automate research, outreach personalization, and workflow efficiency
• Maintain clean CRM hygiene in HubSpot — all activity logged, pipeline stages accurate
• Collaborate with product and engineering to share feedback from the field
• Mentor BDRs and help define what great pipeline looks like

What You Bring

• 3–6 years in a closing role in Cloud Infrastructure, MLOps, or AI/developer tooling
• Proven track record closing deals with technical buyers (developers, ML engineers, CTOs)
• Comfortable navigating multi-stakeholder enterprise sales cycles
• Strong written and verbal communication — concise, credible, technically literate
• Entrepreneurial and self-driven — you build your own process and don't wait for a playbook
• Disciplined forecaster with clean CRM habits and a data-driven approach to pipeline management
• Familiar with HubSpot, Clay, Claude/ChatGPT or equivalent tools

Why Featherless

• Build out the AE function at a company growing in one of the fastest-moving spaces in AI
• Work directly with the CRO — your wins shape the company's trajectory
• Be part of a small, high-performing team making open weight AI accessible to everyone
• Competitive base + commission