Role Summary:

Join Portkey as the first dedicated pre-sales technical hire, partnering closely with sales leadership to support complex enterprise deals and help organizations successfully deploy AI in production.

You will work directly with AI engineers, ML platform teams, and technical leadership at customer organizations, translating real-world technical requirements into scalable solutions using Portkey’s platform.

This role sits at the intersection of sales, engineering, and product and will play a key role in defining how the company wins technical evaluations and converts pilots into long-term enterprise customers.

Success in this role means helping customers reach technical validation quickly, winning competitive evaluations, and establishing the pre-sales playbook that future SE hires will scale.

Reporting To:

Head of Sales

Work Environment:

Remote, US

Opportunity Highlights

Founding technical GTM seat: Define how Portkey sells technically — including demo structure, POC frameworks, architecture narratives, and evaluation processes..

Build a function from the ground up: This hire will have the opportunity to build and lead the Solutions Engineering team as the company grows and the enterprise sales organization expands.

Massive market timing: As enterprises move AI workloads into production, infrastructure for reliability, governance, and observability becomes mission-critical.

Direct collaboration with founders and engineering: Work closely with the CEO, CTO, and engineering team to translate customer needs into product improvements and roadmap priorities.

Why This Role Stands Out

• Make a Difference: Your contributions will shape Portkey.ai’s growth and success.
• Innovation & Challenge: Work on projects that redefine production AI infrastructure.
• Limitless Growth: Opportunities for advancement in leadership and expertise.
• Culture of Excellence: Join a team that values impact, ownership, and innovation.

What You’ll Be Doing

Lead the technical side of enterprise deals

• Partner with AEs to drive technical discovery and solution alignment
• Engage directly with AI engineers, ML platform teams, and architects
• Serve as the technical authority during enterprise evaluations and competitive bake-offs

Design and run Proof of Concepts (POCs)

• Scope and execute structured trials with clear success criteria
• Guide customers through integrations and deployment workflows
• Troubleshoot technical blockers during evaluations

Win technical evaluations

• Compete against platforms like LiteLLM, TrueFoundry, Helicone, and other AI gateway providers
• Identify competitive signals early in the evaluation process
• Demonstrate Portkey’s advantages in reliability, governance, scalability, and enterprise readiness

Build the early pre-sales playbook

• Create repeatable assets such as:
• demo frameworks
• POC templates
• architecture diagrams
• security and governance narratives
• Establish best practices for technical discovery and evaluation management

Collaborate across the organization

• Work closely with engineering and product teams to solve customer challenges
• Provide structured product feedback from real customer environments
• Help shape how Portkey scales pre-sales as the company grows

What You Bring to the Table

• Experience
• 4–8+ years in Sales Engineering, Solutions Architecture, or technical pre-sales
• Experience supporting enterprise SaaS or infrastructure sales
• Proven ability to run technical evaluations, pilots, or POCs
• Comfortable operating in early-stage startup environments
• Industry Knowledge
• Experience selling into technical buyers and/or infrastructure, DevTools, AI/ML, API, or cloud environments is highly preferred.
• Technical Background:
• You do not need to be a full-time engineer, but you should be comfortable engaging deeply with technical stakeholders and architecture discussions.
• Helpful areas of familiarity include:
• APIs and developer platforms
• AI / ML infrastructure or developer tooling
• Python or working with technical notebooks
• LLM systems and generative AI architectures
• Integration workflows and platform deployments
• Logging, monitoring, or observability concepts
• The most important requirement is the ability to understand complex technical environments and translate them into practical solutions.

Core Skills

Technical Discovery & Architecture

• Curiosity to understand a customer’s technical stack
• Ability to map technical requirements to platform capabilities

POC Leadership

• Experience running structured technical evaluations
• Ability to define success criteria and manage scope during trials

Commercial Awareness

• Strong partnership with sales to advance deals
• Ability to recognize competitive signals during evaluations

Communication

• Strong demo and presentation skills with technical audiences
• Ability to explain complex concepts clearly to engineering teams

Startup Mindset

• Comfortable operating with ambiguity
• Builder mentality with a desire to create systems and processes
• High ownership and proactive problem solving

Bonus Points

• Experience in AI infrastructure, LLMOps, DevOps, or ML platforms
• Background working with AI engineers, ML engineers, or platform teams
• Experience at early-stage startups (Seed–Series B)

What Success Looks Like

First 90 Days

• Ramp on product architecture and competitive landscape
• Partner on early enterprise POCs
• Begin building the first technical evaluation framework

6 Months

• Improved POC win rates and faster pilot-to-paid conversions
• Clear technical positioning against competitors
• Established demo and POC best practices

12 Months

• Scaled pre-sales motion supporting a growing sales team
• Foundations in place for a Solutions Engineering team
• Potential to begin building and leading the SE function