Founding Sales Engineer

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 two things on every deal: whether the buyer believes it will work, and whether they believe it is worth it. You partner with our AEs from first demo through POC to close, then stay close after signature to get customers live and show the value they’ve realized. As the first hire in the function, you shape the playbooks, value frameworks, and pillars that future sales engineers will run on. The role is in person in the Bay Area, with travel to meet customers.

What you'll do

• Own the technical sale

  • Partner with AEs on every deal, from near-term wins to multi-quarter strategic opportunities.

  • Lead technical discovery with security, platform, and engineering teams to map the customer’s systems, identity model, agent use cases, and risk posture.

  • Run demos, design POCs with clear success criteria, and get them working yourself.

• Build the business case

  • Establish a baseline with business and technical stakeholders: how work gets done today, what agents already touch, and where over-permissioning creates risk.

  • Quantify the future state and present ROI, TCO, and payback a CFO or CISO can take to their own leadership.

  • Translate technical concepts into business outcomes, so an engineering win becomes a budget decision.

• Prove value after the sale

  • Help customers go live, including hands-on setup such as custom MCP servers and middleware, and step into support when needed.

  • Lead value realization reviews with existing customers and turn the results into proof points, references, and expansion paths.

• Build the function

  • Create the collateral we don’t have yet: demo environments, POC templates, ROI models, business case templates, and customer value stories.

  • Coach AEs on technical discovery and value selling, and write the playbooks and onboarding future SEs will run on.

  • Bring what you learn in the field to product and engineering, push for what customers need, and speak confidently to the roadmap.

About you

• You have 4+ years of experience, ideally as a sales engineer, solutions engineer, presales engineer, solutions architect, forward-deployed engineer, or business value consultant, 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 have built business cases that closed deals. You are comfortable with enterprise financial modeling and the metrics buyers use to approve spend: ROI, TCO, NPV, IRR, and payback.

• You understand enterprise infrastructure, identity and security, the modern tech stack, and how software teams actually ship.

• You are inquisitive. You can run a discovery interview with a CISO, a platform lead, and a finance partner, and come out with a baseline you can defend.

• 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 are 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.

• Background in business and technology strategy consulting, or a degree in business, economics, or finance alongside your technical depth.

• You have run value realization or customer success reviews that turned into expansions.

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.

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