Sales Engineer

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Go-to-market·Remote

• Pacific time overlap·Full-time contractor·Competitive salary commission
  
  

Sales Engineer

Run technical evaluations for the ad teams considering HawtAds. Demo the editor, scope integrations, win deals, and feed the product back what enterprise needs to ship.

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The first technical voice in every deal.

HawtAds is bottom-up. Marketing and creative teams trial the editor and convert themselves. The bigger evaluations (agencies, in-house teams running creative at scale, enterprise buyers) need someone technical in the room from the first call.

That is the role. You are the first technical voice every serious prospect hears: discovery, demo, trial setup, integration scoping, security review, redlines. Less a classic enterprise SE pushing slideware, more a player-coach who can sit with a customer’s marketing and engineering teams and actually move things.

What you own.

• Run technical evaluations end-to-end: discovery, demos, trial setup, scoping, security review, contract close.
• Own the demo and trial environments. Keep them honest with the current product. If the demo lies about something, you fix it that week.
• Scope and deliver integrations on real deals: SSO, audit log, asset library wiring, webhooks, custom workflows.
• Sit in on customer calls and turn raw prospect feedback into product backlog the engineering team will actually use.
• Partner directly with the founder on deal mechanics: pricing, security questionnaires, redlines, procurement.
• Build the technical content the next deal needs: docs, sandboxes, security pages, integration guides.
  
  

The first six months.

Calibrated to real deliverables, not busywork. You ship in week one and the harder ownership questions land later.

• Week 1 to 2 Sit in on every active evaluation. Run one demo top to bottom. Find one thing in the demo flow that lies about the product and fix it.
• Month 1 Own the pipeline of in-flight evaluations. First integration scoped and shipped on a real deal.
• Month 3 Trial-to-paid conversion has moved. You have rewritten at least one demo and shipped one integration that closed a deal.
• Month 6 Sales engineering is a defined surface, not a heroics function. Every serious prospect hears you first, and the playbook you wrote is what unblocks the next hire.
  
  

What you bring.

• 3 years in sales engineering, solutions, or pre-sales for a developer or SaaS product. You have closed real deals, not just supported them.
• You have run an evaluation from first call to signed contract and you can walk us through one.
• Comfortable in the browser dev tools, writing small scripts, reading API docs, and debugging webhooks live on a call.
• You write well. Prospects read what you send before they meet you.
• You know how to disqualify. Time on a bad-fit deal is gone for good.
• Comfortable owning the deal mechanics: scoping calls, pricing conversations, security questionnaires, redlines, procurement.
  
  

Nice to have.

• Background in advertising, marketing operations, or creative tooling.
• You have shipped product before. The line between SE and engineering is thin here, and PRs are welcome.
• Public-facing presence: talks, writing, community work.
• Early-stage experience where the SE role bleeds into marketing engineering and customer education.
• You have built a sandbox environment or interactive demo that closed deals.
  
  

The stack you will touch.

You do not need to have used all of these. You need to be the kind of person who picks them up fast.

Product Next.js, TypeScript, Prisma, Postgres

Integrations REST webhooks, Stripe, Better Auth, R2

CRM HubSpot

Demos Loom per-prospect sandbox tenants

Docs Markdown in-repo

Observability Sentry, PostHog

How hiring works.

We do not run gauntlets. The process is calibrated to give us both real signal without wasting weeks of your life.

• Apply Send a CV plus a short note: walk us through one evaluation you ran end-to-end. What you scoped, what you cut, what closed. No cover letters.
• Intro 45 min with the founder. We talk about what you would own, why now, and whether we are mutually serious.
• Deep dive A take-home, around 4 hours: scope and respond to a real prospect brief we have run before. You will present it back to us.
• Onsite (remote) Two sessions: a live demo of HawtAds to a mock prospect (we play the prospect), and a conversation about the deal motion you would build.
• References offer Two references of your choosing. Offer follows within a week of the onsite.
  
  

Apply for Sales Engineer.

Send a short note about one evaluation you ran end-to-end. That is what we read first.

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