Founding Sales Engineer

Mintive; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Significant equity

Ownership of technical sale

Direct access to CEO and product

Job summary

Mintive, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is hiring its first sales engineer to own the technical sale from demo through close. You will lead technical discovery, run the demo, design the POC, and answer deployment questions about how Mintive's MCP gateway fits a customer's environment.

You will be hands-on, build integrations, assist with advanced setup, and contribute to the playbooks and onboarding as the team scales. The role requires in-person collaboration and travel to meet customers.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in a sales engineer, solutions engineer, presales, or related role.
• Experience selling complex technical products (infrastructure, security, dev tools).
• Hands-on technical ability to build integrations and deploy POCs.
• Ability to communicate business value to non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical sale from first demo to close.
• Lead technical discovery, design the POC, and answer deployment questions.
• Stay involved post-signature for live deployments and advanced setup.
• Shape the sales engineering function and onboarding for new hires.

Skills

Sales engineering

Presales

Solutions architecture

DevOps familiarity

AI tooling awareness

Education

CS/Math/Engineering background

Tools

MCP

AI agent tooling

Job description

About Us

Mintive helps companies put agents to work safely. We exist to help companies do more of their work with agents, and we build the infrastructure that makes a company's own work runnable by them. That has to start from trust. Our first product is an MCP gateway that gives those agents governed access to company data and tools.

About Us

Mintive helps companies put agents to work safely. We exist to help companies do more of their work with agents, and we build the infrastructure that makes a company's own work runnable by them. That has to start from trust. Our first product is an MCP gateway that gives those agents governed access to company data and tools. Before agents can touch Slack, GitHub, Jira, Snowflake, internal databases, or production systems, you need to know what they can reach, what they did, and why they were allowed to do it. Most people carry far more permissions than any single task needs. If an agent uses your token directly, it inherits all of them. Our gateway product scopes that access down to exactly what an agent needs to do its job and captures the data flows and audit logs security teams need. From there we are building the rest of the agent stack: connectors, monitoring, sandboxing, long-running agents, and memory, with the goal of becoming the system a company's work runs on. We work in person in the San Francisco Bay Area. The structure is flat and the market moves fast, so you have a lot of latitude over what you work on and how. We are AI-native. Everyone uses Claude and Codex every day, and we have more agents than employees. They run in Slack alongside the team and handle sales, marketing, deal ops, and engineering on the same gateway we sell to customers, and we are building an entire company operating system around them. Since launching in February 2026, we have grown to 50+ paying customers, with strong inbound demand. Customers include Coursera, Arlo, and Braze. We are backed by Cowboy Ventures and Coatue, with angels including Frederic Kerrest (Okta), Michael Grinich (WorkOS), Andrej Karpathy, Jeff Dean, and Scott Belsky. Our founders are machine learning experts from Stanford, Berkeley, and CMU, with applied research at Google Brain and Waymo, and one co-founded Coursera.

The job

You are our first sales engineer, and you own the technical sale. You work alongside our AEs as a partner on every deal, from the first demo through the POC to close. You lead technical discovery, run the demo, design the POC, and answer every question about how our gateway product would actually deploy in a customer's environment. The AE owns the commercial side of the deal and you own whether the buyer believes it will work, so you have as much say in how a deal gets won as anyone on it.

Depending on the deal's complexity, you may stay involved after the signature: helping get customers live, doing hands-on advanced setup (e.g., custom MCP servers, middleware), and stepping into support.

You are also one of the strongest voices customers have inside Mintive. You'll see a lot of customer environments up close, so you bring what customers need straight to product and engineering, push for it, and speak confidently to the roadmap in front of a technical buyer. We'd rather you tell us what customers actually need than tell customers what they want to hear.

As our first sales engineer, you'll help shape how the function grows: the playbooks we run, how we onboard new people onto the team, and the pillars that guide it. We have strong inbound and a team of five AEs who need you on every deal. The role is in person, with travel to meet customers.

About You

• You have 4+ years of experience, ideally as a sales engineer, solutions engineer, presales engineer, solutions architect, or forward-deployed engineer, and you understand how a technical sale moves from first call to signature.
• You have sold complex technical products (e.g., infrastructure, security, dev tools), not apps.
• You come from software engineering or a logic-based field (e.g., CS, math, physics, engineering). That said, your track record matters more than the degree.
• You are hands-on technical. You can build a custom integration, debug a deployment, and get a POC working yourself.
• You communicate clearly with engineers and executives in the same meeting, and you can explain why the product matters to the business as well as how it works.
• You make the reps around you more effective, and AEs want you on their deals.
• You are AI-native, or will get there fast, and is genuinely curious about AI, agents, and how companies adopt them.
• You move fast without a lot of process, and you would rather build the motion than inherit one.

Bonus

• DevOps background, and you enjoy being customer-facing.
• Experience with MCP or AI agent tooling.

What we offer

• Competitive base, variable, and significant equity.
• Ownership of the technical sale, and a real say in how the sales engineering function grows.
• A front-row seat to agentic AI, with room for special projects like building internal agents.
• Direct access to the CEO, customers, and product decisions.
• Health benefits, on a team that puts family and health first.