AI Sales Engineer

Vectara provides an Agent Platform that allows organizations to rapidly create AI applications that are grounded in the context from their data and knowledge. Our end-to-end platform provides critical capabilities required for enterprise adoption: high accuracy even with incredibly complex data, powerful agent harness, comprehensive observability, and the ability to run in any environment (cloud, VPC, on-premise).

We build AI for doing. We are passionate about helping users take advantage of breakthroughs in applied AI to solve problems and get stuff done. Our team is a group of unquestionable all-stars in their respective fields of computer science and business. Come join us in this mission.

Role Overview:

Vectara is looking for an experienced Sales Engineer to join us. You will be connecting customers with the magic of our product, aligning our capabilities to the pain points and business opportunities they are attacking. You will remain the trusted technical point of contact throughout the customer's journey with our product.

You will work as an integral part of our Sales and Customer Success motions, and you will work hand-in-hand with our Professional Services team. This will include assisting them as they first learn about the product and conduct their evaluation, then helping as they build their first production application, then providing assistance and guidance once they have launched. By doing so you will play an integral part in delivering sales and customer satisfaction outcomes for our business.

To do this well you will maintain a strong relationship with our Product, Engineering, and Machine Learning teams, so you can effectively respond to customer needs while ensuring that what we build meets the requirements of the market. You will be the technical face of the company and build relationships with the technical leaders within the customers you serve. In this way you will positively influence your customers and help them successfully navigate their way through the AI era.

If you enjoy being a technical thought leader who provokes fresh ideas on what is possible, provides clear explanations for how to incorporate AI into impactful products, and has a very strong customer-first orientation, then we should talk.

Key Responsibilities:

While accomplishing the above big picture outcomes, your day-to-day tasks will include the following:

• Providing technical product expertise
• Conducting demos, including custom-built ones when needed
• Helping with POCs
• Assisting customers with architecture, design, and development
• Scoping and planning PS projects
• Conducting evaluations and performance tuning of retrieval and agentic pipelines to ensure applications meet rigorous enterprise requirements
• Responding persuasively to functional and technical elements of RFIs/RFPs
• Conducting regular check-in meetings with customers to update them on new features and identify opportunities for expanded usage
• Communicating relevant feedback to internal teams to improve our product and processes

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of Sales Engineering experience, supporting the GTM motion of companies in one of the following spaces: AI, ML, search, analytics, data engineering
• Experience selling technical products to AI, Data, or IT organizations within large enterprises
• 2+ years of Professional Services or internal development experience, working in large enterprises to design and develop applications
• Experience with agentic AI development, spanning the context layer to the agent harness - skills, tools, guardrails, etc. 
• Development experience with Python and/or Java
• Experience developing apps that heavily consume REST services
• Understanding of architectural principles for cloud-based platforms, including SaaS, VPC deployments, multi-tenancy, and automation
• Understanding of architectural principles for on premise systems, including hardware, compute (especially GPUs), virtualization (especially k8s), and networking
• Strong communication, interpersonal and collaboration skills
• Compelling storyteller, with experience building product narratives and pitches
• Ability to communicate complex technology concepts crisply and simply
• Should be available to travel to visit your accounts up to 20% of the time
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or an equivalent field of study; MS a plus but not required
• Location: US West Required, Bay Area preferred

Salary is just one component of Vectara’s employee compensation. Our full-time employees are also equity owners in the company, which although not an immediate cash component, can have positive impacts on long-term total compensation for each participating employee. We would be remiss if we didn’t highlight and celebrate our focus on engaging many of our employees in being economic co-owners of the business.

Vectara welcomes all. We value the collective wisdom of people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. We never discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or marital, veteran, or disability status. Vectara has a positive and supportive culture—we look for people who are inventive and work to be a little better every single day. We seek to be smart, humble, hardworking and, above all, curious.

Perks and Benefits:

100% paid Medical, Dental, Vision for employees. Option of Health Savings Account (HSA) or Flexible Savings Account (FSA). Generous paid time off (PTO) plus paid sick time and holidays. Professional development and training opportunities. A supportive, caring company culture that treats each team member with respect and empathy.