Clera
Clera

Forward Deployed Engineer (Founding Customer Engineer)

$140,000 – $185,000 per year

TLDR

Own end-to-end customer relationships as the first non-founder hire, shaping a scalable playbook for AI-powered autonomous demo and sales agents.

About the Role

This is a rare opportunity to be the first non-founder hire at a seed-stage B2B SaaS company building AI-powered autonomous demo and sales agents for go-to-market teams. You'll own every customer relationship end-to-end and build the playbook that scales the customer base from tens of customers to thousands.

You'll sit at the intersection of technical depth and customer empathy — coaching AI agents, automating workflows, and translating real customer conversations directly into product decisions alongside the founding team.

What You'll Do

  • Teach and coach AI agents on product positioning, buyer personas, pricing conversations, and sales tiers to improve their performance.

  • Own customer relationships end-to-end — from onboarding through ongoing success, demo improvement, and adoption.

  • Serve as the voice of the customer: mine conversation logs and feedback to surface patterns and inform the product roadmap.

  • Build automation workflows and systems (scripting, APIs, low-code/no-code tools) to scale the customer engineering function without proportional headcount growth.

  • Collaborate directly with the CTO to translate customer insights into shipped product features.

  • Define and document the repeatable playbook for customer onboarding, success, and expansion.

What We're Looking For

Required

  • 0–3 years of experience in a customer-facing technical role in SaaS (e.g., solutions engineer, customer engineer, technical account manager).

  • Strong written and verbal communication skills; demonstrated ability to lead product demos and customer onboarding sessions.

  • Hands-on experience building automation workflows to scale customer engineering tasks (scripting, REST APIs, or low-code/no-code platforms).

  • Ability to analyze customer feedback and conversation logs to identify meaningful patterns and translate them into actionable product improvements.

  • Experience coaching or configuring AI agents for sales contexts — defining personas, tiers, and pricing conversations.

  • Instinct to identify repetitive manual work and eliminate it through tooling or automation.

  • Must be authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship.

  • Must be able to work on-site in San Francisco, CA.

Nice to Have

  • Background in or exposure to GTM, sales engineering, or revenue operations at a high-growth B2B SaaS company.

  • Familiarity with interactive demo platforms, conversational AI, or sales automation tooling (e.g., companies like Walnut, Navattic, Storylane, Arcade, Demostack).

  • Experience working in a very early-stage (seed / pre-seed) environment where you've built processes from scratch.

Compensation & Benefits

  • Salary: $140,000 – $185,000 USD annually

  • Early-stage equity participation

  • Direct impact on company direction as the first non-founder hire

Location

  • On-site in San Francisco, CA (required)

  • Visa sponsorship is not available — candidates must be authorized to work in the US without sponsorship

Benefits

Equity Compensation

Early-stage equity participation

Clera harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to match high-growth startups with exceptional talent, streamlining the entire headhunting process. This innovative approach simplifies the job search for candidates while providing startups with access to a curated pool of skilled professionals who align with their needs.

Founded
Founded 2024
Industry
Internet Software & Services
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