Founding Customer Engineer

Cardinal is an AI-native outbound sales platform that helps companies run precision outbound campaigns. The Founding Customer Engineer will serve as the first responder for customer issues, reproduce and fix problems, ship scripts and product fixes, support onboarding, build internal debugging tools, and turn recurring customer friction into product improvements.

What you'll do:

• Own first response in customer Slack channels — reproduce, diagnose, and give a real answer, fast
• Ship fixes directly: bugs on live campaigns, data and enrichment issues, sequence and sender misconfigurations, backfills, one-off scripts
• Decide what's a same-day fix versus what needs a spec, and write the spec when it's the latter
• Join onboarding and weekly check-in calls; unblock customers live rather than taking notes
• Build the internal tooling that makes the next fix faster — admin views, replay and debugging tools, health checks that catch problems before the customer does
• Turn recurring friction into evidence-backed tickets so the product stops generating the same requests

What they're looking for:

• US citizen/visa only
• You're comfortable dropping into unfamiliar code and following a problem wherever it goes — frontend state, API, queue, third-party integration, someone else's rate limit. You're fluent in logs, traces, and production data
• You can tell the difference between what a customer asked for and what they actually need, and you can say so without being difficult about it. You write clearly under pressure, including when the answer is "this is broken, here's when it'll be fixed."
• You've worked at a sales-adjacent company — an outbound tool, a CRM, a sales intelligence platform, a revenue-tech startup — or you've been the technical person at a startup who actually built and ran the outbound motion yourself. You should immediately understand why a "step 3 reply detection" bug or a "lead enrichment timeout" matters to a customer. If words like sequence, enrollment, ICP, intent signal, deliverability, and sender rotation don't make you glaze over, we want to talk
• This is an in-person role at our SF office
• Have done forward-deployed, solutions, or support engineering at a technical product company — and have opinions about how to do it without becoming a ticket queue
• Have founded a company, been an early engineer at a YC-stage startup, or shipped a product 0→1
• Have built or worked at a GTM/sales/CRM/enrichment tool — Apollo, Outreach, Clay, Attio, HubSpot, Salesforce, Gong, Common Room, or anything in that orbit
• Are a power user of GTM tools yourself — you've actually run outbound, written sequences, and fought with deliverability
• Have built internal tooling or observability that other people ended up depending on
• Any (new grads ok)

Benefits:

• 0.50% - 1.00% equity
• In-person role at the SF office