---
title: 'Enterprise Sales Engineer at Variance'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-sales-engineer-variance-san-francisco-wz60q5thfqf1'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-13'
---

# Enterprise Sales Engineer at Variance

- **Company:** Variance
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-03-31
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/intrinsic-safety/be755556-bf3d-4693-b405-9348ef80bae3

## Job description

## Role

At Variance, we are teaching machines to make the hardest judgment calls at scale. That means building AI agents for the high-stakes gray area of risk investigations, fraud, and identity reviews. We’re a small, talent-dense team in San Francisco, with former founders and talent from top AI labs. Our customers include Fortune 500s, global marketplaces, and regulated financial institutions. Winning in this market requires more than strong product and engineering, it requires earning trust with sophisticated buyers, navigating complex technical environments, and showing clearly how Variance fits into mission-critical workflows. We’re looking for an Enterprise Sales Engineer to lead the technical side of our enterprise sales motion. You’ll partner closely with account executives, founders, and prospects to understand customer workflows, run technical discovery, build compelling demos, and prove how Variance can deliver value in high-stakes environments. This is a pre-sales role for someone who is deeply technical, highly customer-facing, and excited to help large enterprises adopt AI systems they can trust. This is an in-person position. Our office is located in San Francisco, CA.

What will your day-to-day look like

- Lead technical discovery with enterprise prospects to understand workflows, systems, constraints, and success criteria
- Design and deliver tailored product demos that map Variance to real customer pain points in fraud, risk, and identity operations
- Build proof-of-concepts and pilot environments that show how Variance performs in customer-specific use cases
- Partner with account executives to move complex deals forward by addressing technical objections and reducing implementation risk
- Act as the primary technical counterpart during the pre-sales process for buyers, architects, security teams, and operational stakeholders
- Answer product, architecture, integration, data flow, and security questions with clarity and confidence
- Work cross-functionally with product and engineering to translate prospect feedback into roadmap insights and product improvements
- Help standardize the technical sales motion by improving demo assets, solution narratives, technical collateral, and repeatable playbooks

## Requirements

- 5+ years of experience in Sales Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Solutions Architecture, or a similar pre-sales technical role
- 3+ years of experience supporting enterprise software sales cycles with large customers, ideally including Fortune 500s, regulated companies, or complex multi-stakeholder deals
- Proven experience leading technical discovery, demo design, proof-of-concepts, and pilot execution for enterprise accounts
- Strong experience explaining APIs, integrations, architecture, security, and data flows to technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Experience supporting sales processes that involve security reviews, architecture reviews, or procurement diligence
- Strong coding ability, with proficiency in Python, Java, TypeScript, or a similar language, and enough technical depth to build lightweight prototypes, integrations, or demo environments
- Strong understanding of LLMs, GenAI, and agentic workflows, including the ability to communicate both capabilities and limitations credibly
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with strong executive presence and the ability to build trust quickly
- Highly self-directed and comfortable operating in ambiguity in a fast-moving startup environment

Strongly preferred

- Experience selling or supporting technical products in fraud, risk, identity, compliance, or financial services
- Experience with enterprise SaaS, workflow software, or AI platforms sold into operational teams
- Familiarity with common enterprise concerns around security, privacy, governance, and deployment
- Experience building demo environments or solutions using APIs, data pipelines, or workflow automation
- Experience working with buyers in regulated industries such as fintech, banking, payments, marketplaces, or insurance

What success looks like

- Prospects leave technical conversations with a clear understanding of how Variance fits into their environment and workflows
- Demos and pilots are sharp, credible, and directly tied to customer pain
- Technical objections are addressed quickly and effectively, helping complex deals move forward
- Enterprise buyers trust Variance not just as a product, but as a technical partner
- Insights from the field improve the product, sharpen the sales motion, and increase win rates

## What we offer

- Health care: we offer platinum-level medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Unlimited PTO, sick leave, and parental leave
- Up to $100 in reimbursement for personal health and wellness expenses each month
- Free lunch and dinner
- 401(k) plan

## About Variance

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Variance builds AI agents that automate complex risk investigations, such as sanctions screening and fraud review, for Fortune 500s and regulated financial institutions.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A, $21.5M raised in March 2026)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Michael Lin and Karine Mellata

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Enterprise AI, Compliance Technology, Cybersecurity, Risk Management
- **Target customers**: Fortune 500 companies, marketplaces, and regulated financial services (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "To build technology that helps good prevail in highly adversarial environments." [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/company)

## Products & Services
- **Variance AI Agents**: A suite of AI agents designed to automate the full investigative workflow for compliance and risk teams. Agents can handle tasks from Level 1 to Level 3 reviews, including sanctions screening, fraud review, and identity verification. They extract insights from messy data (scanned documents, images, websites) and provide a complete, auditable evidence trail for every decision. [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $24.6M ($3.1M Seed in 2024 + $21.5M Series A in March 2026). [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/variance)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (Winter 2023 batch), with the Series A led by a prominent venture firm (specific lead investor not named in the provided search results, but the round was reported by Axios and Business Wire).
- **Growth Signals**: Raised a $21.5M Series A in March 2026, signaling strong market traction. The company claims its agents can reduce investigative cycles by 10x and collect 90% of evidence for each case. Trusted by Fortune 500s.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Auditability & Explainability**: Unlike many "black box" AI systems, Variance is "built for regulators and auditors." Every decision comes with a complete, cited evidence trail, making it defensible in a highly regulated environment.
- **Adversarial Focus**: The company is explicitly designed for "highly adversarial environments" where threats evolve constantly, giving it a sharper focus than general-purpose automation tools.
- **Speed to Production**: The company emphasizes a culture of velocity, measuring timelines from prototype to production in "days, not months," allowing them to adapt quickly to new fraud patterns.

## Strategic Focus
- **Deepening Enterprise Sales**: The company is actively hiring Enterprise Account Executives and Sales Engineers, indicating a push to expand its customer base among large, regulated institutions.
- **Product Development**: Open roles for Research Engineers (Evals, Judgment Systems) and Senior Software Engineers suggest a continued focus on improving the accuracy, reliability, and reasoning capabilities of their AI agents.
- **Scaling the Team**: With a Series A close in early 2026, the company is in a clear growth phase, expanding its engineering and go-to-market teams from a small base (12-person team per YC profile).

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Values**: The company emphasizes a culture of **Ownership** (every employee is an owner from day one), **Velocity** (fast iteration), **Craftsmanship** (deep care and intentionality in building), and **Impact** (building systems trusted for mission-critical decisions). [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/company)
- **Work Policy**: In-person in San Francisco.
- **Compensation & Perks**: Offers competitive salary and meaningful equity. Benefits include platinum-tier medical/dental/vision insurance, a 401(k) program, unlimited PTO/sick leave/parental leave, daily catered lunches and dinners, a monthly wellness stipend, commuter benefits, and company events. [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/careers)
- **Engineering Culture**: A high-agency environment where engineers own end-to-end responsibility for systems. The work is technically challenging, involving building AI that operates in real-time against sophisticated adversaries.

## Sources
1. [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/)
2. [variance.com/company](https://www.variance.com/company)
3. [variance.com/careers](https://www.variance.com/careers)
4. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/variance)

## Other roles at Variance

- [Software Engineer, Agent](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-agent-variance-san-francisco-dza9223d58q9) — San Francisco, CA
- [Enterprise Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-variance-san-francisco-0sebfqrpdc9k) — San Francisco, CA
- [Agent Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/agent-product-manager-variance-san-francisco-7kwq2pbz1mkv) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/product-designer-variance-san-francisco-whvwasrtj9m7) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Marketing Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-lead-variance-san-francisco-8qk1v7zqt80f) — San Francisco, CA
- [Enterprise Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-variance-new-york-yd980aaksyfc) — New York, NY
- [Research Engineer, Evals](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-evals-variance-san-francisco-geadd7cbpjyz) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer, Judgment Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-judgment-systems-variance-san-francisco-3czxbrkkqtvr) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-variance-san-francisco-qpk136xty44m) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-variance-san-francisco-vd07ecwmbygz) — San Francisco, CA