FDE - Enablement (Pre-Sales)

📋 Description

• • Tessera Labs is at the forefront of enterprise Artificial Intelligence, revolutionizing how businesses adopt and operationalize AI. Backed by leading venture capital and guided by a distinguished founding team, we specialize in building sophisticated multi-agent AI systems designed to automate complex business workflows across critical enterprise platforms like SAP, Salesforce, Workday, Snowflake, and MuleSoft. Our core mission is to deliver tangible AI automation to enterprises with unparalleled speed, precision, and measurable impact. We foster a culture of rapid iteration, extreme ownership, and continuous innovation at the cutting edge of applied AI.
• • The Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE) - Enablement is a pivotal pre-sales, customer-facing technical role that strategically bridges the gap between Sales, Product, and Engineering. This position is instrumental in driving revenue growth by establishing technical credibility, expertly shaping customer solutions from the outset, and significantly accelerating deal cycles. You will achieve this through compelling technical presentations, meticulously planned proofs of concept, engaging hands-on workshops, and providing crucial technical support for Statements of Work (SoWs).
• • Distinct from delivery-focused FDE roles, this position does not entail ownership of full production deployments. Instead, the FDE - Enablement's primary focus is on solution framing, technical validation, and building unwavering customer confidence during the critical sales and pre-contract phases. This role is ideally suited for engineers who possess a passion for articulating technical concepts through compelling narratives, thrive in dynamic customer interactions, and excel at translating the intricacies of advanced AI systems into clear, concrete business value.
• • Why This Role is Crucial: Enterprise buyers are increasingly sophisticated; they don't purchase AI based on vision alone; they invest based on confidence. FDEs in Enablement are the linchpin in establishing Tessera's technical credibility, effectively de-risking complex decisions for our clients, and ensuring that sales opportunities progress smoothly with clearly defined scope, architecture, and expectations. You will be the technical vanguard for Tessera in high-stakes strategic sales cycles, wielding significant influence over deal strategy, scope definition, and the overall solution design. Furthermore, you will play a vital role in shaping early customer feedback, providing invaluable insights that directly inform and refine our product roadmap. This role demands close collaboration with Sales, Architecture, and Product teams to successfully secure and deliver complex enterprise opportunities.
• • Key Responsibilities - Pre-Sales Technical Enablement: You will partner intimately with Sales and Account Management teams to provide comprehensive technical support throughout enterprise sales cycles. Acting as the primary technical point of contact, you will lead technical discovery, evaluation, and validation phases, adeptly translating complex customer business challenges into innovative, AI-driven solution approaches. This involves delivering high-impact technical presentations tailored to diverse customer audiences, ranging from engineers and architects to senior executives, clearly articulating Tessera's multi-agent AI architecture, its unique capabilities, and key differentiators with unwavering credibility. You will skillfully customize demonstrations and narratives to resonate with specific customer use cases and industry verticals, while also supporting internal enablement efforts by developing reusable demo assets for the Sales team.
• • Key Responsibilities - Proofs of Concept (PoCs) & Workshops: A significant part of your role will involve designing and executing customer-specific Proofs of Concept to rigorously validate both the technical feasibility and the tangible business value of Tessera's solutions. This includes building lightweight prototypes or demonstrating functional workflows that vividly showcase the power of Tessera's AI agents within real-world enterprise scenarios. You will collaborate closely with the Engineering team to ensure PoCs align with current product direction and technical best practices, and you will be responsible for clearly communicating PoC results, identifying any limitations, and outlining next steps to both customers and internal stakeholders. Additionally, you will lead hands-on technical workshops designed to engage customer teams in exploring potential architectures, workflows, and integration strategies. You will facilitate productive whiteboarding sessions and live solution design discussions, helping clients visualize how AI agents can seamlessly integrate into their existing technology stacks and operational models.
• • Key Responsibilities - Deal Support & Collaboration: You will provide critical technical input for Statements of Work (SoWs), meticulously defining scope, outlining assumptions, identifying dependencies, and assessing risks. Your expertise will be essential in supporting effort estimation, delineating solution boundaries, and defining the optimal implementation approach. You will collaborate closely with Delivery and Architecture teams to ensure a seamless technical handoff post-sale. Furthermore, you will foster strong cross-functional collaboration, working hand-in-hand with Product, Engineering, Architecture, and Delivery teams. You will be instrumental in capturing valuable customer feedback and objections, channeling this information back to inform product improvements and enhance our offerings. Your contributions will also help standardize pre-sales technical assets, demo patterns, and workshop formats, ensuring consistency and efficiency across the organization.
• • Technical Skills & Experience: We are seeking individuals with strong hands-on experience in Python, with a beneficial familiarity with JavaScript/TypeScript. Proficiency in working with APIs, backend services, and enterprise integrations is essential. Exposure to major enterprise platforms such as SAP, Salesforce, Workday, Snowflake, MuleSoft, or similar systems is highly desirable. A solid understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs), AI orchestration, and agent-based architectures is crucial, along with the ability to clearly explain AI system behavior, its inherent tradeoffs, and limitations to a customer audience. Practical experience in applying AI to solve real business workflows, beyond theoretical demonstrations, is a key requirement. Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and the ability to discuss scalability, security, observability, and governance at a high level are also important. Comfort with whiteboarding and explaining end-to-end system architectures is expected.
• • Required Qualifications: A minimum of 5 years of experience in software engineering, solutions engineering, or technical consulting roles is required. At least 2 years must be in a customer-facing, pre-sales, or enablement capacity. Proven experience in delivering technical presentations, demonstrations, or Proofs of Concept to enterprise customers is essential. You must possess strong communication skills, capable of engaging effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. The ability to operate effectively in ambiguous and fast-moving sales cycles is critical. Prior experience contributing to or supporting Statements of Work is necessary. A willingness to travel to customer sites, primarily within the U.S., is also required.