turbopuffer is looking for someone to lead and develop our deployed engineering function. DEs are the technical champions for our customers. They own the technical outcome of the sales cycle, and serve as the go-to technical partner as our customers explore scale, expansion, and renewals. Their work spans demos, POCs, benchmarks, firefighting, and whatever it takes to make our customers successful.
what you'll do:
lead and develop the DE team, as a player-coach
work closely with your peers in GTM to develop and refine the technical sales motion
act as a bridge between GTM and engineering teams, and as a voice of the customer
own the technical relationship end-to-end, from discovery, to expansion and renewal
spend time in-person visiting prospects and customers as a key part of the relationship
build concrete benchmarks, demos and POCs instead of slides, drive evaluations, guide implementations
treat customer problems as your own and don't rest until they're solved
live in customer slack channels, helping to solve problems and architect solutions
say no when we're not the right fit and always have a growth mindset
must have:
leadership exp - guiding the team is second nature. you constantly think about best practices, and document your work so others can learn from it.
ai-first - you are obviously agent pilled and understand how it unlocks another level to what we can provide
commercial - we unlock product ambition by reducing cost & reducing operational burden
sales x technical - you expertly balance the sales cycle with deep technical domain expertise
data or database background - you love looking at explain plans and optimizing schemas
linux - you're comfortable in terminals and reading logs
python or javascript/typescript - for building solutions and demos
typist - you can write well and can explain complex ideas simply
human - you build trust and know when you're in over your head
nice to have:
vector search or full-text search background
k8s and cloud platform experience
performance benchmarking experience
tpuf is hardcore & whimsical. we value:
overstep > understep
show > tell
complexity is earned
showing up as part of our customer’s team
making stuff easy to react to
Skills Required
- Experience leading and developing a technical team, including establishing best practices and documenting work
- AI-first mindset and understanding of how AI agents can improve customer offerings
- Commercial understanding of reducing costs and operational burden
- Ability to balance sales-cycle responsibilities with deep technical expertise
- Background in data or databases, including explain plans and schema optimization
- Comfort working in Linux terminals and reading logs
- Programming experience with Python, JavaScript, or TypeScript for building solutions and demos
- Strong written communication and ability to explain complex ideas simply
- Ability to build customer trust, recognize limitations, and take ownership of problems
- Vector search or full-text search experience
- Kubernetes and cloud platform experience
- Performance benchmarking experience
What We Do
turbopuffer is a serverless search engine that combines vector and full-text search using object storage. It is designed to make large amounts of data searchable for AI applications, offering high scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency by separating compute and storage. It serves as a critical infrastructure layer for companies needing to retrieve context for AI models, handling billions of documents with low latency.
