Sales Engineer for OpenCraft
OpenCraft - https://opencraft.com/
Headquarters: Fully remote company (worldwide, incorporated in France)
Open-source
We are a team of veteran open-source developers, working on educational and community-based projects in an open-first environment – and we are looking for a team member who can help us manage client relationships and handle sales.
Our team focuses on custom software development and large scale deployments of the Open edX Platform. Since the product we’re providing is very technical, and most of our leads are technical managers, we require our sales engineer to have strong engineering fundamentals in order to speak with authority on our services.
This team member will act as a quick reference for engineering questions and ballpark estimates, work with other engineers on the team to build proposals, and be the first team member most leads meet. They will guide the sales process from start to finish. The work you do will impact learners all around the world.
Remote-first
Unlike companies who reluctantly started to accept remote workers recently, we have embraced it from day 1. For the past 10+ years, we have based and refined our way of working around remote-friendly workflows, from the ground up. No day-long video meetings, mandatory work hours, or risk of being forced back into an office one day – as long as you have a good internet connection, it’s none of our business where you work from. 
We are all working remotely, from all continents (except Antarctica, at least so far - applicants welcome!). We use remote-friendly and timezone-agnostic workflows based on asynchronous principles and good documentation practices.
For this sales position, you will need to schedule time to meet with clients, which are mostly in US time zones. As long as your schedule can overlap enough with the US to consistently hold meetings with prospects, you can work where you like.
Online education
We are one of the main contributors to the Open edX project, the main open-source MOOC platform created by MIT, Harvard and many other top universities. It powers sites like edX.org, the MIT Open Learning Library, and the national online learning platform for France. We provide development and hosting for institutions like Harvard Medical School, Harvard LabXchange, Cloudera, Autodesk, and several governments. We are not affiliated with edX.org, but we contribute and work with them on various projects.
Contracting terms
This is a part-time to full-time, permanent contract position, billable hourly. We aim for long-term relationships – once in, almost all team members stay for many years.
We care about paying fairly:
- Team members set their own compensation level, which is paid based on hours worked (no unpaid overtime!).
- When determining your rate, we will expect you to factor in benefits (vacation, healthcare, purchase budgets, etc.) - the idea is to let you pick the benefits that are useful to you, rather than offer one-size-fits-all packages that aren’t always very valuable.
- We also proactively apply generous raises team-wide, based on the company results at the end of each year. See the details about how we approach compensation in our handbook.
We also firmly believe in work-life balance: as long as you deliver what you commit to, there is a lot of latitude in how much work you can choose to accept. We are open to time commitments anywhere in the 20h to 40h/week range, and highly discourage working more than that. It’s important to have time to ourselves, as well as having some slack, and there are diminishing returns in working more anyway.
Culture and Work Style
We are a highly collaborative development team working in an agile environment. We have built a mostly flat organization, composed of ~30 senior software developers with a handful of support staff. You will be working with highly competent individuals who take responsibility for their work, and the same will be expected of you.
We belong to self-organized teams, so management doesn’t interfere with our day-to-day responsibilities and leadership is situational. You will lead some projects and join others. You will have a great deal of discretion in the work that you do and much of your work will be publicly viewable. Team members are continually learning from each other, and we place an emphasis on sustainable work practices and mental health. We help each other out when the unexpected happens and give kudos and recognition for work well done.
Camaraderie is strong, standards are high, and so is the retention rate. We invest in documentation and automation so that redundant work is minimized and team members can focus on more interesting problems. The work is completely remote – most planning is done asynchronously, and the sprint process itself is iteratively improved. We focus on minimizing meetings so when they do happen it’s for productive reasons. In order to make sure we still get some face time, we schedule optional social events to talk, play games, and engage in other activities. We also meet yearly in person at the Open edX Conference, and use the opportunity to meet everyone, along with the rest of the community, and do a team retreat.
OpenCraft runs on the open first principle. Most of our conversations, code, and policies are publicly viewable.
Our handbook, like much of our work, is publicly viewable and you can find it at https://handbook.opencraft.com/.
You can also visit our forums at https://forum.opencraft.com/.
We welcome applicants of all genders and ethnicities.
Basic Requirements:
- Experience in sales and customer account management
- Must have made contributions to open source projects
- Experience with:
- Django
- React or a similar frontend framework
- REST APIs
- Docker
- Linux
- At least one RDBMS like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite.
- Git
- Comfortable with holding meetings, performing presentations and speaking publicly
- Strong English communication skills, both written and spoken
- Strong interpersonal skills
- Familiarity with tools like Trello, Jira, and GitLab
- Comfort with working with a mostly asynchronous team (most communications will be over email)
- Can-do attitude
- Attention to detail
Nice to Have:
These items are a plus and stronger consideration will be given to candidates who can meet these:
- Knowledge of the education academia and industry - especially online learning, MOOCs or the Open edX online course platform
- Experience Participating in collaborative online communities - eg. forums, games, open source
- Blog post and/or copywriting experience
- Familiarity with project planning tools like Jira, Trello, or GitLab
- Proficiency with Google Sheets or other Spreadsheet programs
How to Apply for this Position
Visit this link to fill out our form and apply!