Pre-sales Engineer (US Based) at Duvo

Remote-first across the US. Occasional travel to Europe and to customer sites across the US. About the role Pre-Sales Engineers are how Duvo wins. You're in the room from first technical conversation to signed deal, turning interest into conviction by showing customers what AI can actually do inside their operation. You run discovery, shape the solution, demo the platform, scope the pilot, and own technical credibility throughout the sales cycle. You won't deliver the production build. That's the FDE's job. But you'll design what gets sold, defend it under technical scrutiny, and hand it over clean. The deals you scope are the deals Duvo ships. If you like being the technical brain in a sales motion that's actually about outcomes, not features, this is the role. What you'll do - Partner with AEs across the sales cycle. Lead the technical conversation from first call to close - Run discovery sessions with operational and technical stakeholders. Get to the real workflow fast - Map customer workflows on the Duvo platform and identify where agents create the most leverage - Size the value. Build defensible business cases tied to KPIs the customer's executive team already tracks - Design pilot scope: what gets built, what success looks like, what's measured - Demo Duvo against real customer scenarios, not canned examples - Build POCs and prototypes when a deal needs proof before commitment - Own technical responses to RFPs, security questionnaires, and architecture deep-dives - Push back on bad scope. Protect the deal and the delivery team from setups that won't work - Hand over to FDEs cleanly so what was sold is what gets built - Feed signal from the field back to Product, Marketing, and Sales: what resonates, what doesn't, what's missing What success looks like - Pipeline you touch converts at a higher rate - Customers leave first technical meetings believing AI can change their operation, with a credible plan for how - Pilots you scope land in production. FDEs trust your handovers - Sales trusts your judgment on feasibility, scope, and which deals to chase - Your demos and POCs become reusable assets that compound across the team - Win/loss reasons are clear because your scoping was clear Who you are Experience 5+ years in technical, customer-facing roles where you've shaped and won real deals. We're prioritizing AI-native candidates: people who have been working hands-on with AI and agentic systems in customer environments, not adjacent to them. Likely backgrounds: - Pre-sales / sales engineering / solutions engineering at an AI-first or automation company - Forward-deployed or applied AI engineering with a strong commercial instinct - Technical consulting on AI or automation deals where you owned the technical win - Product or operations roles where you've pitched and shipped AI-powered solutions to enterprise buyers Retail, e-commerce, or CPG background is a strong plus. Fluency in any operational domain (supply chain, procurement, category management, merchandising, finance ops, supplier management, warehousing) helps you sound credible faster in customer conversations. What matters most is that you can pick up a new business quickly, see where AI creates real value, and make the customer believe it. Skills - Hands-on with modern AI tooling: LLMs, agent frameworks, prompt engineering, evals, MCP, retrieval - Strong systems thinking. Can read a customer's stack and find the leverage points - Comfortable in code-adjacent territory: SQL, Python or JS scripting, APIs, JSON, webhooks, light data work - Familiarity with ERPs and enterprise stacks is a plus - Strong commercial instinct. You can size value, defend pricing, and qualify ruthlessly - Sharp communicator and presenter. Can lead a room of operators, technologists, or executives and adjust on the fly - Fluent English. German or other European languages are a strong plus Mindset - Bias to win, not just to pitch - Comfortable with ambiguity, half-built systems, and changing requirements - Low ego, high standards - Customer-obsessed. You earn trust by being useful and honest, not by performing - Commercially aware. You think about deal economics, not just technical elegance - Honest about what's working and what isn't, including with sales What we offer - A small, sharp team that values ownership and candor - Real product and culture leverage from day one - Front-row seat on the deals that shape Duvo's trajectory - Competitive comp including equity - Option to trade cash for equity How we hire 1. Online screen 2. Hiring manager interview (remote or on-site) 3. Case study and presentation 4. Founder interview We're not looking for perfection. We're looking for someone who can walk into a customer's operation, run sharp discovery, design a solution that holds up under scrutiny, and turn AI into deals that close and deliver.