Forward Deployed Engineer (Founding Customer Engineer)

Clera

$140K — $185K *
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 0-3 years in a customer-facing technical role within SaaS.
  • Strong communication skills for demos and onboarding.
  • Experience in building automation workflows (scripting, REST APIs, low-code/no-code).
  • Analytical skills to derive insights from customer feedback and logs.
  • Experience in coaching AI agents for sales roles and configuring their strategies.
  • Proactive in identifying and automating repetitive tasks.
  • Authorized to work in the US without sponsorship.

Responsibilities

  • Teach and coach AI agents on sales strategies and product positioning.
  • Manage customer relationships from onboarding to ongoing success.
  • Act as the voice of the customer to influence product development.
  • Build automation workflows to enhance customer engineering processes.
  • Work with the CTO to translate customer feedback into product features.
  • Create a documented playbook for customer success and onboarding.

Benefits

  • Early-stage equity participation.
  • Direct impact on company direction as the first non-founder hire.
Full Job Description
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

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