Founding Solutions Engineer
About The Position
Scalar is seeking its first Solutions Engineer to join the founding sales team. This role is crucial for scaling the company's founder-led sales motion by taking ownership of the technical aspects of the sales process. The Solutions Engineer will work closely with the CEO, learning the existing sales process and then building out the technical components, including demos, proofs of concept, migrations, and customer onboarding. This is a unique opportunity to shape how a company sells by building repeatable technical sales processes from the ground up. The ideal candidate will be a hands-on builder with deep API knowledge and experience in customer-facing technical roles.
Requirements
- Experience in customer-facing technical roles such as solutions engineering, sales engineering, forward-deployed engineering, developer relations, or consulting.
- Ability to hold your own in technical discussions with skeptical staff engineers.
- Proficiency in writing code, with TypeScript as the primary stack; comfortable building working integrations live on a call.
- Deep understanding of APIs, including OpenAPI, JSON Schema, authentication flows, and SDK ergonomics.
- Ability to take a deal from the first technical call through to successful onboarding without a pre-defined process.
- A preference for honesty about limitations and a focus on winning future deals over short-term wins.
- Collaborative approach to problem-solving, operating with kindness and a high level of agency.
- Comfort working in an in-office environment in San Francisco.
Nice To Haves
- Experience at a developer-tools or API company, particularly selling to engineering teams.
- Hands-on experience with MCP, agents, or LLM-powered developer tooling (e.g., MCP SDK, Vercel AI SDK, Vertex AI).
- Experience with Vue 3 or the ability to ramp up quickly.
- Previous experience as the first or second Go-To-Market (GTM) technical hire.
- Experience running technical evaluations against enterprise requirements (self-hosting, SSO/SAML, air-gapped deployments, procurement security reviews).
- An in-house-first instinct, with experience building own clients and tooling.
- Open-source contributions that can be reviewed.
Responsibilities
- Conduct live demos and hands-on Proofs of Concept (POCs) against prospect's real APIs.
- Scope technical calls, address architecture questions, and handle security and compliance reviews.
- Manage documentation migrations from various platforms (Redocly, Mintlify, Stoplight, ReadMe, homegrown) and clean up OpenAPI documents.
- Demonstrate SDK generation across multiple languages (TypeScript, Python, Go, PHP, Java, Ruby) and assist in spec refinement.
- Set up MCP servers and demonstrate agent capabilities against prospect APIs.
- Collaborate with the CEO to transition founder-led selling into a repeatable motion, defining qualification criteria, demo environments, and POC scoping.
- Build sample applications, custom themes, integration glue, and reproduction cases.
- Contribute to Scalar's own repositories by opening PRs for fixes and improvements.
- Own the first 90 days of a new customer's onboarding and provide technical escalation support.
- Provide product feedback with evidence, including reproductions and potential patches.
- Set the technical bar for future hires in the sales team and train new Solutions Engineers.
- Regularly engage with the codebase and potentially own features end-to-end to unblock customers.
Benefits
- Flexible, unlimited time off.
- Meaningful early equity.
- Variable compensation component tied to team and company targets.
- Opportunity to shape sales processes and build foundational technical sales motions.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Entry Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
