Founding Sales Engineer

You will build the first structured GTM motion at Bauplan with the founders. Your mission is to turn Bauplan's architectural and technical advantage into a repeatable commercial motion and win the next 10 strategically relevant customers. You will own positioning, the technical narrative, the content that carries it, and the pipeline that content produces. We also expect you to build the team with the founders.

The terms of success in 9 months:

1. 10 strategically relevant customers closed from pipeline the GTM team generated, with you owning the technical win in each. You are not responsible for closing the single deals, but this role requires ownership of the end to end commercial pipeline, from demand generation to signature.
2. A motion that runs without the founders. At the end of this process we should have a repeatable playbook someone else can run, as opposed to 10 deals we cannot clearly replicate.
3. The first GTM team hired and working. Built with the founders, calibrated by you.

What you will do

• Own the technical win. Discovery alongside the AEs, technical validation and POCs on your own. You are the person who makes a staff data engineer believe the architecture.
• Build and own the narrative with the founders. Rewrite how Bauplan is described, in public, until our target personas repeat it back to us unprompted. Sit in engineering meetings, understand what is actually new, and turn it into something that hits with a buyer.
• Generate pipeline. Named account prospecting, technical outbound, conferences and community. You will work closely with the Founding Content and Demand Marketer on the content engine.
• Turn all of that into a repeatable motion, working as one unit with the founders and the FDE team.
• Make the next hires. Solutions engineer first or BDR first is your call, but we expect you to be involved in building the first core GTM team with us.
• Feed the product loop. Every customer engagement should make the next one easier. If it does not, it was professional services.

What we look for

1. 5 to 7 years of experience. This role is hands on. We want someone senior enough to have owned outcomes end to end, but not so senior as to be detached from hands-on work.
2. Technical origin, commercial trajectory. You started technical, in sales engineering, solutions architecture or data engineering, and you have already moved toward the deal. Somewhere in your history you have owned a number, sourced your own pipeline, or made the jump into a quota carrying role.
3. Strong technical credibility. You can sit in a room with a staff data engineer and hold the technical argument yourself, without the backup of a senior engineer.
4. Experience with technical products and software infrastructure. Data infrastructure in particular.
5. 0 to 1 experience, by choice. You built the function from zero at least once (first solutions engineer, first content program that produced real pipeline, hired the first BDR). Experience at Databricks, Snowflake, MongoDB or Datadog is useful, but it cannot be the whole story. For calibration, Temporal and CockroachDB sit at the upper bound of what we mean by early stage.
6. You go out and get it. Cold outreach, prospecting and running events are part of this job. This is not the SE role as it exists at a Series C company, and we would rather be blunt about it now than discover it in month three.
7. Experience with content. You blog, you publish benchmarks, you give talks at conferences, and you have an audience built in the open.
8. You build the message, you do not receive it. Positioning and narrative are part of your job. They are not something marketing hands to you.
9. You stick around. We want people with an average tenure of two years. We do not want candidates who jump around too much.
10. Your job titles will be fluid because you typically owned the whole path from technical differentiation to revenue. You may come from solutions, sales engineering, early stage chief of staff or GTM.

We are not looking for

• An SE who waits for a qualified opportunity. At this stage there is nobody upstream of you.
• A strategist. The deliverable here is pipeline and closed revenue, not a plan.
• Anyone who needs an engineer in the room to get through a first technical call.
• Anyone whose entire career has been at FAANG companies.
• A pure marketer or a pure sales person. The job is fairly end-to-end so things do not split cleanly.
• Someone looking for the enablement version of this role. Post-sale enablement and expansion sit with our FDE team.

Location

San Francisco or New York, in office three days a week.