The mandate: Help enterprise customers adopt voice AI from the first technical conversation through production deployment — technical discovery, solution architecture, demos and POCs, and technical validation. Partner with Sales, Product, Engineering, and the founders. Founding scope is stated: "As one of our first Sales Engineers, you'll help define the function, build repeatable technical sales processes, and play a critical role in scaling one of the fastest-growing Voice AI platforms." Position among Retell's customer-facing technical reqs: ReqDepartmentCompCycle positionFounding Sales EngineerApplied AI$170–260KPre-sales through production handoffDeployment StrategistApplied AI$170–260KDiscovery through production launchSenior FDEApplied AI$200–300KPrototyping to production, sales partnershipApplied AI EngineerTechnical Success$200–300KPost-sale onboarding, debugging, expansionCustomer Success EngineerTechnical Success$65–75/hrPost-sale onboarding, debugging, expansion Five customer-facing technical seats with overlapping scopes. This one is the most explicitly pre-sales: RFP responses, security questionnaires, architecture diagrams, and technical win strategies appear only here. Confirm with Retell how these are distinguished and never submit one candidate to multiple. What You'll Own Technical sales and customer discovery
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Partner with AEs from discovery through production handoff
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Lead technical discovery on customer architecture, business goals, requirements
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Develop technical win strategies for strategic enterprise opportunities
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Present to engineering teams, architects, and executive stakeholders Solution architecture and design
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Design enterprise voice AI solutions: APIs, integrations, conversation architecture, security, deployment strategy
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Translate requirements into scalable solution designs
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Recommend production deployment best practices across enterprise environments
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Guide architecture reviews and technical decision making Demos and proofs of concept
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Build demos, prototypes, and POCs demonstrating measurable business value
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Support customer pilots and technical evaluations
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Create sample integrations and technical assets that accelerate adoption
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Move customers from evaluation into production Technical product expertise
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Become the expert on Retell's platform, LLMs, prompting, telephony, APIs, deployment
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Lead architecture reviews, product deep dives, security discussions
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Own RFP responses, technical documentation, security questionnaires, and architecture diagrams
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Influence roadmap through customer feedback Cross-functional leadership
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Work with Sales, Product, Engineering, and Customer Success to close complex enterprise deals
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Establish best practices for technical sales and customer onboarding
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Support strategic customers through implementation
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Represent customer needs internally Requirements Hard gates:
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2+ years as a Sales Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect, Forward Deployed Engineer, Customer Success Engineer, or another customer-facing technical role
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Bachelor's in CS, CE, EE, or a related technical field
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Strong technical fundamentals: APIs, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, software architecture, integrations
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Comfortable presenting to both engineering teams and executive stakeholders
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Experience building demos, prototypes, or POCs
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On-site, Redwood City Profile:
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3–8 years realistically, given the band
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Simplifies complex technical concepts into business value
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Thrives with high ownership and ambiguity
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Works cross-functionally across Sales, Engineering, Product, and Customer Success Strong bonuses (not listed but recurring in the responsibilities):
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Telephony, SIP, or real-time communications — named in the technical expertise section
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Security questionnaire and RFP experience — an unglamorous specialty, explicitly owned here, and rare
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CCaaS or contact center sales engineering — Five9, Genesys, NICE, Talkdesk, Twilio, LivePerson
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LLM and prompting depth
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Prior founding or first-SE experience where the function was built from scratch
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Enterprise security review and architecture documentation experience Location and visa:
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On-site, Redwood City
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Sponsorship: H-1B, TN, L-1, E-3, F-1 (OPT/CPT), and O-1 Anti-patterns
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Sales engineers whose scope is demo delivery with no architecture or POC building
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Solutions architects with no sales-cycle involvement
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Engineers with no executive presentation experience
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Candidates who need an existing SE playbook, demo library, or technical asset set — none exist
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AEs with light technical depth
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Support or post-sales engineers with no pre-sales exposure
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Remote requirements Who Will Thrive Here
Someone who has carried the technical side of enterprise deals — running discovery with an architect, building the POC, writing the security questionnaire response, and presenting the solution to a CTO. They can define a function rather than execute inside one, since no SE playbook, demo library, or technical asset set exists yet.