Sales Engineer

Company Overview:

Sustainment is an AI-native software platform that helps US-based manufacturers easily find and work with the critical suppliers they need to build and manage their supply chains. Our vision is to reimagine American manufacturing as a hyperconnected, secure, and resilient ecosystem of local and regional suppliers who can more easily connect, interact, and do business with the industry and government customers that rely on them.

We are a dual-use technology platform that supports both DoD and commercial customers in pursuit of our vision.

The opportunity

Manufacturers depend on their supply base, but the work of connecting to it still runs on manual handoffs and ERPs that were configured before most SaaS companies existed. Sustainment is building the software layer that changes that. We sell to upper mid-market and enterprise manufacturers who feel that pain every day.

You'd be our first Sales Engineer. You won't inherit a playbook. You'll write it. You'll be the technical partner on every deal: the product expert, the demo builder, and the person who shows a prospect exactly what their process looks like once Sustainment is running it.

Your influence goes beyond the deal. What you learn in the field will shape our roadmap, our sales motion, and how this function grows.

What you'll own

Product mastery.

You're the person who knows the product best outside Engineering, and you're endlessly curious about how it works and where it can take our users next.

Custom demos.

You build demos around the prospect's actual situation, and you like experimenting with AI to solve problems alongside internal teams, prospects, and customers. This is the heart of the job.

Demo environment.

You partner with Product and Engineering to maintain our demo instance, so it always shows the product at its best.

Partnership with Customer Delivery.

You work alongside our Technical Success Manager, who maps how a prospect buys today and designs their future state with Sustainment. You make sure the demo and the story line up with that picture, and you feed what you hear in the field into their work.

On-site workshops.

You lead hands-on sessions with prospect teams that show buyers, engineers, and IT what working in Sustainment looks like.

Technical partnership with AEs from first call to signature.

You lead technical discovery, handle objections, run proof, and own the conversations with IT and technical stakeholders, where the technical win is often decided.

Technical storytelling.

You're a storyteller, not just a technical teller. With your AEs, you connect what the product does to the business impact it creates.

Force multiplier for the revenue team.

Your impact reaches beyond your own deals. You sharpen AE and BDR product fluency, help Marketing build technical content that scales, and turn what works in one deal into a play the whole team can run.

Field intelligence.

What you learn in technical discovery goes back to Product and Engineering. At our stage, you're one of the highest-signal voices they have.

Why this seat

Ground floor of an emerging category.

You'll help define how the market understands what we do.

Build the function.

Your work becomes the foundation for how Sales Engineering runs at Sustainment as we grow.

A real seat at the table.

You'll have a direct line to Product and Engineering leadership, and your input changes what gets built.

Work that matters.

You'll help manufacturers strengthen the supply base the country depends on.

What you bring

• 5+ years in Sales Engineering, solutions consulting, or similar technical pre-sales.
• Real exposure to ERP integrations, whether scoping, validating, or implementing. Any ERP counts, and SAP is a bonus.
• A feel for what a requirement costs to build: API versus flat file, on-prem versus cloud, who owns the middleware, whether IT will grant access. You don't need to write the code, but you can tell a two-week ask from a two-quarter one.
• Comfort walking through a prospect's current process and connecting it to how they'd work in Sustainment, in their language.
• A track record of winning the technical decision in complex B2B deals with multiple stakeholders, including IT.
• You like teaching, and making the people around you better is part of how you measure your own work.
• Excitement about being the only SE in the building, and about leaving a lasting mark on our growth strategy, team design, and GTM.
• Bonus points
• SAP (or other ERP) experience
• Procurement, RFQ, or supply chain workflow knowledge
• Selling into or implementing in manufacturing or industrial environments
• Experience as an early or founding technical hire at a Series A/B company
• How we work
• Sustainment is a Public Benefit Corporation headquartered in Austin. Our team includes retired military leaders and operators who have built things under real constraints. We run on clear ownership, measurable outcomes, and a bias to action. Low ego isn't a slogan here. It's a hiring filter.
• Sustainment offers a competitive benefits package for full time employees including medical, dental, vision, paid time off, company holidays, and 401K matching.
• Sustainment is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other protected class.
• Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.
• Sustainment participates in E-Verify.