Sales Engineer, Customer Success — Bay Area

About Operant AI

Operant AI is the only complete agent defense platform — offering four of the most important products at the forefront of securing AI in the world today: Agent Protector, Endpoint Protector, AI Gatekeeper™, and MCP Gateway. Together, they form the most comprehensive runtime defense suite available for enterprises deploying AI at scale, protecting every layer from infrastructure to LLMs to agentic workflows.

Operant is the only vendor recognized across all five of Gartner's most critical AI security reports — a distinction that reflects both the breadth and depth of what we've built. Backed by leading Silicon Valley VCs including Felicis and SineWave Ventures, we are on a mission to make AI deployment fast, frictionless, and secure.

We are hiring a technically exceptional Sales Engineer with a strong post-sale orientation to be a core part of Operant's customer-facing team in the Bay Area — someone who brings genuine engineering depth to every customer engagement and is as comfortable in the architecture weeds as they are in a strategic business review.

The Role

This is a technically deep, customer-facing role with an emphasis on post-sale success. You will support Operant's most important US accounts through the full customer lifecycle — from technical validation and proof-of-concept through deployment, adoption, and long-term expansion — while also lending your technical credibility to the pre-sale process where needed.

You will work directly alongside Operant's founders — the CEO, CTO, and COO —, serving as the technical backbone of the customer relationship. You are the person in the room who can go as deep as the customer needs: reviewing security architecture, debugging a deployment, advising on agentic AI risk posture, or leading a technical deep-dive with a team of staff engineers.

This is not a role for generalists. The ideal candidate has built things, broken things, and secured things — and brings that hands-on engineering credibility into every customer conversation. It is a consultative technical partnership at its core: you are expected to be a trusted advisor to some of the most sophisticated engineering and security teams in the world, not just a product demonstrator.

This is a high-visibility role at a fast-moving, industry-leading AI startup. You will be working at the absolute forefront of AI security alongside a lean, high-caliber team that moves fast and expects the same from everyone on it. The learning curve is steep by design — and for the right person, that's the point.

What You'll Do

Post-Sale Customer Success Engineering

• Own the technical post-sale relationship for strategic US accounts — serving as the long-term trusted technical advisor on AI security architecture, platform adoption, and evolving threat coverage
• Drive successful onboarding and time-to-value, ensuring clean and complete deployment of Operant's runtime defense stack across complex customer environments
• Conduct regular technical business reviews (QBRs/EBRs) alongside sales and customer success leadership, grounding the conversation in security telemetry, adoption metrics, and architecture outcomes
• Proactively identify and remediate adoption gaps, integration challenges, and coverage blind spots before they surface as escalations
• Advise customers on AI security architecture, agentic AI risk, MCP deployment patterns, LLM runtime protection, and cloud-native defense strategies
• Identify expansion opportunities — new use cases, additional product modules, deeper coverage — and work with the sales team to develop them commercially
• Build reusable technical assets: deployment guides, integration runbooks, security architecture reference patterns, and onboarding playbooks that scale across the US customer base
• Act as the voice of the customer internally, translating field experience into product feedback and engineering priorities

Pre-Sale Technical Support

• Support the sales team on strategic deals — leading technical discovery, delivering tailored product demonstrations, and architecting proof-of-concept engagements
• Respond to technical RFPs, security questionnaires, and architecture reviews with precision and depth
• Serve as a senior technical resource in executive conversations with CISOs, CTOs, and VP-level security and engineering leadership

Ecosystem & Community

• Represent Operant at Bay Area industry events, security conferences, AI meetups, and technical forums
• Support channel partners and AI infrastructure partners with technical enablement and co-delivery

What You'll Bring

Required:

• Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol), agentic AI platforms, LLM orchestration, or AI agent security
• Knowledge of and hands-on experience with agentic AI frameworks and vendors — such as LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, AWS Bedrock Agents, Google Vertex AI Agent Builder, or similar — and a deep understanding of how these systems introduce novel security risks at runtime
• 7+ years of experience in a technical customer-facing role — Sales Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Customer Success Engineering, or Staff/Principal-level platform or security engineering — with at least some of that time in a post-sale or customer success capacity
• Genuinely deep engineering background: you have written production code, built or operated infrastructure at scale, or worked as a practitioner in security or platform engineering — not just demonstrated products
• Hands-on expertise with Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, and container security across AWS, Azure, and GCP
• Deep working knowledge of API security, runtime application protection, CNAPP, or cloud workload security
• Fluency in AI/ML deployment architectures — you understand how LLM applications, AI agents, and MCP-connected systems are built at a level that lets you find the seams where they break
• Proven ability to engage senior technical and executive stakeholders with equal confidence
• Experience managing the post-sale technical lifecycle: onboarding, adoption, technical QBRs, expansion, and escalation management
• Based in the Bay Area; hybrid with willingness to travel for key accounts and company engagements

Preferred:

• Prior experience in penetration testing or offensive security — understanding attack methodologies from the adversary's perspective is a major plus in helping customers understand and prioritize their AI threat surface
• Background in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or platform/infrastructure engineering — operational experience running production AI or cloud systems at scale is a significant advantage
• Prior software engineering or security research background — having built or broken systems in a prior life brings a level of credibility that customers notice immediately
• Existing relationships within the Bay Area AI infrastructure and enterprise security ecosystem
• Experience in a growth-stage or Series A/B startup environment where you've had to build process as well as execute

Why Operant AI

• Work at the forefront of the industry — AI security is the defining enterprise challenge of this decade, and you'll be solving it alongside a fast-paced, industry-leading team at the cutting edge
• Direct founder access — you'll work closely with and be supported by Operant's CEO, CTO, and COO on the company's most strategic accounts
• Lean team, outsized impact — this is not a large org with layers of process; it's a tight, high-caliber team where your contributions are visible and your growth is real
• Mission that matters — securing the AI revolution so enterprises can innovate without compromise
• Competitive compensation — base salary, performance bonus, equity, and benefits commensurate with a senior technical role in the Bay Area market