Founding Sales Engineer

About Inventive.ai

At Inventive, our mission is to build intelligence that helps B2B sales teams win deals. Our first product is a suite of AI agents that help sales teams create winning proposals and RFP responses. About $1.4 trillion worth of projects get allocated within the US alone, and we help vendors win these deals using cutting-edge AI.

Our founding team includes successful repeat founders & researchers from Google DeepMind, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and IIT. We graduated from Y Combinator (Summer 2023) and have raised a seed round from the Valley’s top investors.

Our customer base and revenues are growing very fast, and we’re looking for a rockstar to join our small but rapidly growing team. If you’re excited to build something from scratch, take extreme ownership, and sit directly in the revenue engine of the company—you’ll feel at home here.

Company & Founder Profiles

• Founding team:
  • Dhiren Bhatia (UC Berkeley, 3x entrepreneur with successful exits) – Hiring Manager
  • Gaurav Nemade (ex-Google DeepMind, Founding PM of Google LaMDA, IIT)
  • Vishakh Hegde (Stanford, IIT, Author of an AI book)
• Y-Combinator & Media Coverage
  • Launch announcement
  • Business Insider
  • Yahoo Finance

About the Role

We’re looking for a Founding Sales Engineer who will build and own the technical sales motion at Inventive from day one. You’ll work directly with the founders to define how we sell, demo, and position the product to customers.

This is not a traditional SE role. You won’t inherit polished playbooks, demo scripts, or established processes. You’ll create them.

This role will be in person in our HQ in Mountain View, CA (hybrid/remote for the right candidate) and comes with a competitive salary, benefits, and meaningful equity.

We are NOT looking for someone who wants:

• A narrow, reactive SE role
• A mature sales org with predefined playbooks
• Clear instructions for every customer interaction

If you’re a high-agency operator who thrives in ambiguity, loves customer conversations, and wants to build the SE function from scratch—you’ll thrive here.

This role is a high-leverage role in the following ways:

• Revenue Ownership – You will directly influence win rates, deal velocity, and deal size by shaping how Inventive is technically sold.
• 0→1 Function Building – Define demos, discovery frameworks, POCs, security responses, and SE best practices.
• Founder-Level Exposure – Work directly with founders on deals, strategy, and product positioning.
• Customer-to-Product Feedback Loop – Be the primary conduit of real customer insights into Product & Engineering.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities include:

• Design and deliver custom, high-impact demos tailored to customer workflows, data, and buying personas.
• Act as the technical authority in sales conversations, covering architecture, integrations, data flows, AI capabilities and limitations, Security, compliance, and scalability and more.
• Partner closely with founders to shape deal strategy, navigate complex buying committees and overcome technical objections
• Lead POCs and trials, including setup, success criteria, and customer validation.
• Build and maintain:
  • Demo environments
  • Sample datasets
  • Technical documentation and enablement assets
• Own responses to incoming RFPs, security reviews, and enterprise evaluations.
• Establish repeatable SE processes and playbooks as the company scales.
• Collaborate with Product & Engineering to relay customer pain points and influence roadmap and product decisions.

Required Skills

• 4–7 years experience in Sales Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or Pre-Sales, in B2B SaaS.
• Proven ability to run complex, technical sales cycles independently.
• Experience with RFPs and other sales questionnaires.
• Strong storytelling skills—able to translate deep technical capabilities into clear customer value.
• Comfort working with modern AI products (Agents, LLMs).
• Strong problem-solving skills, attention to detail, and executive-level communication.
• Demonstrated ownership and ability to operate in highly unstructured environments.
• Ability to move fast and adapt as the product and sales motion evolve.

Strong Plus

• Experience being an early SE at a startup.
• Background in software engineering, product management, or technical consulting.
• Experience selling into enterprise or regulated industries.
• Workflow automation across CRM system and tools and also using AI agents
• Experience running founder-led or C-level demos.

Location: Onsite (SF Bay Area) / Hybrid / Remote

Team: Go-To-Market (Sales)