The OpportunityLumai's North American customers - hyperscalers, neoclouds, frontier AI labs and national laboratories - are evaluating optical compute now, and the region is being opened up as a market. What it needs is the person who owns the technical half of that: someone who can sit with a customer's ML engineers, prove the system against their workload, and leave them with a case they can argue internally. This is that hire.
The RoleYou will own the technical heart of Lumai's customer engagements in North America, working alongside the business development lead. You will run deep technical discovery with the region's most demanding buyers, translate what they need into a Lumai-based solution mapped against both shipping and roadmap systems, and work hands-on with the benchmark team to prove it against real customer workloads. You will author the technical proposals and responses that let a customer make the argument for Lumai inside their own organisation, and you will be the channel back into product and engineering.
What is genuinely hard about this is that you are proving a new kind of computer against the most demanding workloads in the industry, with no reference account in the region to point at. These customers know their own bottlenecks better than anyone, and your numbers have to hold up twice: in a benchmarking conversation with an ML engineer, and in a business case that survives a procurement review.
By month six, you will have run discovery with the accounts on our target list, delivered at least one benchmark-led evaluation a customer accepted, and written the first version of the engagement playbook the rest of the team can run.
What You'll Do- Lead technical discovery with customer infrastructure and ML engineering teams.
- Map customer workloads onto Lumai's shipping and roadmap systems, and be straight about the gaps.
- Define the shape of each engagement: benchmark, proof of concept, reference architecture or statement of work.
- Scope, run and interpret benchmarks with Lumai's benchmark team, and own the presentation of the results.
- Author the technical case: proposals, solution documentation, and responses to RFIs, RFPs and tenders.
- Design and deliver demonstrations and technical workshops for customer engineering teams.
- Feed customer requirements, evaluation feedback and roadmap reactions back into product and engineering.
- Own the technical relationship on the account alongside Lumai's business development lead.
What We're Looking ForMust-have- Substantial experience in a solutions architecture, technical pre-sales or senior field engineering role within AI infrastructure, high-performance compute, semiconductors or comparable deep-tech hardware.
- Strong working knowledge of AI inference at scale: how large language models are deployed in production, and what limits them.
- Familiarity with data centre architecture: rack power, thermal, networking, and integration with existing software stacks.
- A demonstrated ability to lead technical discovery with sophisticated customers and translate requirements into a solution they accept.
- Comfortable operating in a fast-moving, sometimes ambiguous, pre-product environment.
Strong preference for- Direct experience selling into, or working within, hyperscalers, neoclouds, frontier AI labs or national laboratories.
- Awareness of the competitive landscape and how Lumai's optical approach is positioned against it.
- A background in, or genuine curiosity about, novel compute: photonics, optical computing or other post-silicon architectures.
- Enough hands-on credibility with benchmarking and performance analysis that customer ML and infrastructure engineers respect your reading of the results.
