The magic of small teams can exist at any organization.
We started Span to address a pattern we'd all lived: as teams expand, context is buried under layers of meetings, tools, people and process. Things begin to stall in the "outer loops" like prioritization, allocation, collaboration, and management—areas where mistakes and inefficiencies are arguably more costly.
We are creating a new type of tool that delivers coherent and useful software engineering context for humans and agents alike, a tool that we believe will enable ownership, autonomy, and superhuman impact inside of an engineering organization.
We’re building a future where:
Engineering leaders can understand their most precious resource - team time - so that they’re able to invest intentionally, root out hidden costs of toil, and unlock the true potential of their team.
Everyone inside the organization can have an intuitive grasp of what’s happening so they’re empowered to make better decisions, operate confidently and deliver predictably.
The hours tied up in tagging, status reporting and coordination meetings are automated away so that people spend less time on busywork and more time on the real work.
A Deployed Engineer at Span is an engineer who works directly with the customer to ensure that our product is successfully implemented and delivering value. You will be responsible for key parts of our pre-sales process and follow customers through their early post-sales journey until they succeed with our product. Achieving success requires communication, customer listening, problem-solving, and technical skills to ultimately deliver customer impact – either by leveraging what we have or building what we are missing. This role is ideal for former technical founders because, in essence, that fanatical devotion to making every customer feel like they are at the center of our roadmap that every startup offers in its early days is what you will help us scale up.
You will be paired with an AE on every deal, but they will be responsible for customer rapport, enterprise deal mechanics, and negotiation. At the same time, you will focus on a complementary set of responsibilities.
On the pre-sales relationship side, you will:
Demo our product and answer key technical questions
Answer security and compliance questions
Continually refine our understanding of the customer’s success criteria and pain points
Implement prospects onto Span by helping them with integration setup
Attend periodic check-in meetings throughout the POC phase
Act as technical support during the POC
Assist with training and enablement of POC users (usually VPEs and Directors)
Aside from the above relationship-focused responsibilities, you will own end-to-end execution of the following product/engineering responsibilities:
Do user research (usually during onboarding calls) to discover potential product and/or product marketing improvements.
Identify basic requirements and work with our designer to create conceptual mocks if commitment engineering is required for success.
Directly build and/or work in a small team to build features necessary for the customer to realize their success criteria. This may extend into post-sales, depending on complexity.
Delight prospects by demonstrating extreme agility in addressing minor quality of life or bugfix feedback.
Work on automation and internal tools that improve the likelihood of presales success.
Work closely with the GTM team to shape our product marketing and positioning.
Work closely with the founders on product strategy, acting as a voice of the customer.
If we are wildly successful building funnel, you will be in upwards of ~2 hours of meetings a day spent on sales-like activities with customers (demos, kickoff calls, etc.), but you should be prepared to spend more time with customers as needed in fulfilling your product/engineering responsibilities.
Most of the features we have in Span were built through a commitment engineering approach with design partners. More extensive examples (delivered in ~4-6 weeks) include our R&D Cost Capitalization report, Pulse Surveying capabilities, and Microsoft Calendar integration. Smaller examples include new metrics, report filters, and working norms. We don’t expect you to build every feature on your own, of course, but where it needs to be a team effort due to domain expertise or bandwidth contention, you will at least act as a PM or lead.
You will also work on tools that help improve the efficacy of your role, including internal console workflows and admin scripts. For example, you might build a tool that lets GTM teammates send Slack messages impersonating one of the founders (in an approval queue).
Lastly, given your skillset and proximity to the customer, we expect you to play a strategic role in shaping our presales process and product strategy. We are looking to tap your founder experience and resourcefulness to get us to the next level of growth through whatever means necessary. This means that Job Description aside, you should also be prepared to wear other hats if necessary.
The failure mode is that this role will require you to do a ton of context switching (including juggling customer calls and handling support over Slack) while still being expected to deliver non-trivial engineering work. Our guess is that you’ve done similar context switching in the past as a founder, manager, or staff IC. Only you can say if you’re ready to do it again.
However, if you crave an engineering role tied to impact, this is it. If a customer closes, it’s because you played a significant role. You will do product and engineering work based on your own convictions culled from direct conversations with CTOs and VPEs. And, with each project, if you succeed, you’ll have meaningfully improved our future product leverage while securing a happy, fully enabled customer that will happily renew for years to come.
Backed by dozens of founders and CTOs we admire from places like Slack, Notion, Rippling, Fivetran and Coda, CPOs from places like Adobe and Square, as well as funds like Alt, BoxGroup, Bling, Craft, and SV Angel who dare to dream with us.
Compensation Range: $85K - $200K
