# Customer Engineer ## About Cardinal Cardinal ([trycardinal.ai](http://trycardinal.ai)) is the AI-native outbound sales platform replacing the SDR-and-GTM-engineer stack that companies cobble together today with Apollo, Outreach, Clay, and a few engineers gluing them all together. We're a YC W26 company. In our first few months we've grown to $80K+ MRR, with 50+ YC companies and a growing roster of post-Series-A startups running their outbound on us.
We've raised over $5M from Audacious, Burst Capital, and YC, and we're targeting $10M ARR by mid-2026. We're a small, dense, design-obsessed team. The bar for engineering taste, product instinct, and aesthetic quality is very high — if you've ever opened Linear or Attio and thought "why doesn't every B2B tool feel like this," that's the bar. ## The Role Our customers are founders and GTM leaders who have handed us their pipeline.
When something breaks, or a sequence doesn't behave the way they expected, or they need a field we don't support yet, they say so in a shared Slack channel — and how fast we turn that around is most of what determines whether they stay. As a Customer Engineer, that loop is yours. You're the first responder in every customer channel and the person who actually fixes the thing. Not triage-and-hand-off: you reproduce it, find it, and ship the fix, or you write the one-off script that unblocks them today while the real fix gets specced.
You'll sit on onboarding and check-in calls, so you hear the friction firsthand instead of through a ticket. You'll get customers to their first launched campaign and keep them sending. And you'll be the highest-signal input our product roadmap has, because you're the only person who sees every request, every workaround, and every place the product quietly confuses people. Some companies call this a support engineer or a forward-deployed engineer.
The distinction that matters to us:
you have
- write access and you use it. ## 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 ## We'd love to meet you if you **Philosophy:** You don't file the bug, you fix it.
- A customer waiting on you is a thing you feel.
- You move fast without confusing fast for sloppy, and you know which of the two a given situation calls for. **Debugging range:** 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. **Customer instinct:** 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." **GTM context:** 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. ## Bonus points if you * 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 This is an in-person role at our SF office.
- We're early stage, which means working hard and moving quickly.
- Apply if that excites you. --- ## About Cardinal Cardinal is the AI platform for precision outbound.
- We run outbound for 40+ YC companies, including Mintlify, Greptile, and Luminai.
- "Spray and pray" outbound is dead.
- The best sales teams operate with extreme precision — finding things in common with customers, monitoring their content, mapping inbound signals, and tracking website visitors.
- But doing this well means stringing together 10+ tools and hiring a GTM engineer.
- Cardinal replaces all of that.
- Our AI agents find hyper-targeted leads, continuously monitor what prospects are posting and engaging with on social media, generate personalized snippets based on shared context, and orchestrate end-to-end outbound workflows across email and LinkedIn.
- Cardinal also captures inbound from website visitors, product signups, ad impressions, and social engagement — qualifying and routing them into sequences automatically.
- Cardinal is founded by Devi and Jianna, 2x YC founders (S23, W26) and Harvard/MIT CS alums.
- Their last company, Leafpress, was an energy software company where they closed customers like Lindt and Honeywell from cold outbound.
