Senior Solutions Architect / Sales Engineer, HPC & Computational Engineering

Bolt Graphics is a semiconductor startup based in Sunnyvale, CA building the fastest and most efficient graphics processors (GPUs) for high performance computing (HPC), Rendering, and Gaming. Our technology enables creatives to render photo realistically in real-time, researchers to discover new materials, and designers to simulate state of the art products and buildings before they’re built. We pride ourselves on our first principles approach to solving problems. We are energized by our mission to reduce the barrier of entry for content creation and consumption. Our goal is to enable everyone to easily create, simulate and consume immersive experiences as vividly as they can imagine them.

Our Values

• Be Fearless: Unmute yourself. Test boundaries and get proven right.
• Remain Adaptable: Stay comfortable in a continuously changing world. If you’re wrong, concede and move on.
• Educate Your Ego: Selflessly collaborate towards our shared purpose.

About the role:

Bolt is looking for a seasoned, highly technical customer-facing Solutions Architect/Sales Engineer to partner closely with our Business Development team as we bring a new compute architecture to market.

This person will serve as the technical counterpart to our commercial team, working directly with engineering leaders, researchers, HPC teams, and other sophisticated technical customers to understand their workloads, evaluate where Bolt's architecture can create meaningful advantages, and design the technical path from initial discovery through benchmark, evaluation, and deployment.

This is not a traditional pre-sales demo role. Bolt is introducing fundamentally new compute technology, and many customer engagements will require deep technical discovery, workload analysis, benchmarking, and collaboration with Bolt's engineering organization.

We are particularly interested in candidates with experience in HPC, computational science/engineering, electromagnetic simulation, GPU acceleration, scientific computing, or adjacent compute-intensive workloads.

What you'll do:

• Partner directly with Bolt's commercial lead on strategic customer engagements 

• Lead technical discovery with customer engineering, HPC, research, and infrastructure teams 

• Understand customers' existing workloads, compute environments, bottlenecks, performance requirements, and deployment constraints 

• Identify workloads where Bolt's architecture could provide meaningful performance or cost-performance advantages 

• Translate customer requirements into clear technical requirements for Bolt's engineering organization 

• Design and coordinate benchmarks, technical evaluations, proofs of concept, and workload validation 

• Help customers understand Bolt's architecture and how it compares with existing CPU/GPU-based approaches 

• Answer sophisticated technical questions from customers and partners 

• Work across customer teams and Bolt engineering to resolve technical blockers 

• Help determine whether an opportunity represents genuine technical fit before significant engineering resources are committed 

• Develop technical materials, reference architectures, benchmark methodologies, and customer-facing documentation 

• Support technical discussions with strategic partners, national laboratories, government organizations, enterprises, and ecosystem partners 

• Represent Bolt at relevant HPC, simulation, semiconductor, and technical industry events 

• Bring customer and market feedback back into product and engineering strategy 

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of relevant experience in solutions architecture, sales engineering, field applications engineering, HPC engineering, scientific computing, computational engineering, or a related field 

• Strong understanding of HPC architectures and compute-intensive workloads 

• Experience working with GPUs, accelerators, CPUs, heterogeneous computing, or high-performance computing systems 

• Experience engaging directly with seasoned technical customers 

• Ability to understand a customer's workload and identify where performance bottlenecks occur

• Strong knowledge of benchmarking and performance analysis 

• Ability to communicate complex architecture and performance concepts clearly to both engineers and executives 

• Comfortable operating between commercial and engineering organizations 

• Strong technical judgment and willingness to say when a workload is not a good fit 

• Comfortable working in an early-stage environment where technical and commercial processes are still being developed 

• Willingness to travel for strategic customer engagements 

Highly Desired Qualifications:

• Computational electromagnetics/electromagnetic simulation 

• FDTD, FEM, MoM or related numerical simulation methods 

• HPC simulation workloads 

• CUDA, GPU programming or accelerator optimization

• C/C++ and/or Python 

• Parallel computing 

• MPI and distributed computing 

• Performance profiling and optimization 

• Large-memory scientific workloads 

• HPC clusters and high-speed interconnects 

• Experience with national laboratories, aerospace/defense, scientific computing organizations, or major HPC environments 

• Experience with commercial simulation software and/or internally developed scientific codes 
• Examples of relevant domain exposure could include electromagnetic simulation, computational physics, computational fluid dynamics, EDA, seismic/geophysical simulation, weather/climate modeling, rendering, or other highly compute-intensive scientific workloads.

What Success Looks Like

You become the trusted technical counterpart to Bolt's commercial organization.

When a customer says, “Here is the workload we're running today,” you can quickly help determine:

1. Whether Bolt is technically relevant; 

1. Where the potential advantage comes from; 

1. What information is needed to validate it; 

1. What benchmark or evaluation should be run; 

1. What engineering work is required; and 

1. What technical milestones need to be achieved before the opportunity can progress commercially. 

You will help ensure Bolt concentrates on engineering and commercial resources on opportunities where the technology can deliver meaningful customer value.

Growth Opportunity

This is an early and highly influential customer-facing technical role at Bolt. As the commercial organization scales, this person can help build and ultimately lead Bolt's Solutions Engineering / Field Applications organization.

Ideal candidates MUST be located in the Bay Area and come on-site in our offices in Sunnyvale. Travel is required at least 6-8 times a year for major conferences and team meet ups.

We currently do not offer sponsorship or relocation for this role.

Compensation Range: California: $175,000-$200,000. This range represents the anticipated base pay for this role based on California standards; the final offer may vary based on qualifications, experience, and location.

Benefits:

• Medical, Dental, & Vision - 100% covered premiums
• Equity - Stock Options
• 401(k) match
• WFH Hardware Reimbursement
• Generous Paid Time Off

Bolt is committed to building a diverse and inclusive environment in which we recognize and value each other’s differences as well as fostering a culture that promotes its core values: Professionalism, Integrity, and Respect. As an equal opportunity employer, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, age, disability, or status as a protected veteran.