Field Application Engineer

The Role You'll be the face of our technology in every room that matters, proving, not just pitching, that our switch is the answer. From presales qualification to live demos to design reviews, you own the client conversation end to end, at our office or theirs, hardware in hand. You build the test setups, run the demos, and dig into the failure analysis when something breaks, because credibility here is earned, not claimed. And everything you learn feeds straight back into product, engineering, and sales.

Responsibilities

• Own every technical conversation with the client, covering qualification, demos, and design reviews, wherever their hardware lives
• Show, live, exactly how our switch fits their setup
• Build and run the test setups and demos that prove it
• Debug on the spot when a demo doesn't go to plan
• Drive failure analysis to root cause
• Turn client feedback into sharp, actionable input for product, engineering, and sales
• Be the technical thread running through the entire sales cycle
• Command a room of senior engineers, then pivot to the executive suite, without missing a beat

What We're Looking For

• You'll have experience in hardware, optics, or photonics
• 5 or more years in a customer facing technical role such as Field Applications Engineer, Systems Engineer, or something similar
• A solid grasp of high speed interfaces, system level architecture, and hardware bring up workflows
• Sharp debugging instincts across optics, hardware, firmware, and software: you can chase complex, ambiguous problems in a live customer environment, not just a controlled demo
• A proven track record of hands on work: test setups, live demos, failure analysis, not just slides
• Experience owning presales technical conversations, and turning field feedback into product/engineering action
• The presence to be trusted onsite, clear and credible with senior engineers and nontechnical business leaders alike, in the same day
• Adaptable and pragmatic: startup energy

Additional Info

• Travel: customers are mostly based in the Bay Area, with additional travel across the USA and occasional trips to the UK headquarters for key customer visits. Expect less than 20% travel beyond the Bay Area

Salience Labs Limited is a leader in photonic solutions targeting connectivity for AI datacenter infrastructure.

Backed by over a decade of research from the University of Oxford in the UK and the University of Münster in Germany, Salience’s innovative developments in photonic switching technology enable high-speed, ultra-low latency networking fabrics that remove infrastructure bottlenecks for AI workloads.