Founding Sales Engineer, Hazel AI

Altruist•San Francisco, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Altruist is transforming the multi-trillion dollar wealth management industry by building an AI platform for wealth professionals. We partner with financial advisors nationwide, empowering them to grow, optimize time and resources, and deliver superior outcomes for their clients. We're looking for exceptional talent to help us achieve our mission of making financial advice better, more affordable, and accessible to all. If you're passionate about challenging the status quo and want to do the most important work of your life, we'd love to meet you! About Hazel Hazel is building the AI engine for wealth management that helps unlock 10x growth, efficiency and value for financial advisors and their clients in a regulated industry. Since its launch last September, Hazel has organically and rapidly grown its user base. Hazel is a part of Altruist’s broader mission to make financial advice better, more affordable, and accessible to all. The opportunity Hazel needs a founding Sales Engineer who can turn early customer interest into confident technical buy-in – helping prospects understand what’s possible with Hazel, validating fit in a highly regulated environment, and accelerating deals from discovery through close. You’ll sit at the intersection of Sales, Product, and Engineering: leading technical discovery, delivering crisp demos, running POCs, navigating security/compliance questions, and shaping the sales motion and technical collateral from the ground up. This is a foundational role where your work directly impacts revenue and the product roadmap.

Requirements

4+ years in a Sales Engineer / Solutions Consultant / Forward Deployed Engineer / Implementation role supporting B2B SaaS sales cycles.
Strong ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to mixed audiences (business, ops, compliance, IT).
Experience leading technical discovery, demos, and evaluation plans that progress deals.
Comfort working cross-functionally with Product/Engineering and thriving in ambiguity (early-stage “build the plane while flying it”).
High ownership and operational rigor (notes, follow-ups, crisp next steps, clean handoffs).

Nice To Haves

Experience in regulated environments (security, data privacy, compliance constraints).
Familiarity with modern SaaS architectures: APIs, webhooks, SSO/SAML, RBAC/permissions, logging/auditing, data exports.
Experience with security reviews (SOC2 concepts, vendor security questionnaires) and working with security teams.
Comfort with light technical work (e.g., reading logs, basic scripting, JSON, API testing with Postman).
Prior experience working in a startup environment.

Responsibilities

Technical discovery: Partner with AEs to uncover customer workflows, data constraints, and compliance requirements; map them to Hazel’s capabilities and implementation path.
Demo + storytelling: Deliver high-impact, tailored demos to technical and non-technical stakeholders (advisors, operations, compliance, IT).
POCs / evaluations: Design and run lightweight POCs that validate outcomes quickly; define success criteria, timelines, and next steps.
Security & compliance: Own technical diligence - security questionnaires, architecture reviews, data handling, and regulated-industry requirements – working closely with internal security/engineering.
Solution design: Translate customer needs into solution architectures (integrations, data flows, permissions).
RFPs and technical documentation: Produce and maintain reusable assets: demo environments, reference architectures, integration guides, FAQs, objection-handling, and competitive positioning.
Field-to-product feedback loop: Capture patterns from the field (feature gaps, objections, requirements) and influence roadmap priorities with crisp customer evidence.
Founding motion building: Help define the SE playbook -- discovery templates, demo scripts, POC checklist, and handoff process to implementation/customer success.

Benefits

A hybrid work schedule for most positions to promote strong, in-person collaboration.
Stunning, amenity-filled office spaces in Culver City, CA, San Francisco, CA, and Dallas, TX. Our offices are intentionally designed for comfort, collaboration, and productivity.
Competitive pay and equity for eligible positions.
Premium healthcare, dental, and vision insurance plans (HMO and PPO).
401k savings plan with a 4% match and immediate vesting.
16 week paid parental leave.
Professional growth and development opportunities including an employee mobility program and an annual L&D budget allocation for each employee.
Company perks program (includes discounts on pet insurance, fitness, cell phone plans, entertainment and travel, etc.).
Financial guidance program (includes counseling on navigating debt, tracking personal spend, saving and planning goals, home-purchasing preparedness, etc.).
One month work from anywhere policy (with the exception of a few countries).
Total compensation includes a competitive benefits package, along with equity in the form of Stock Options (ISOs) for eligible roles.