Jobs in Tech
Who does what
If you’re early in your career and interested in startups / tech, it can be hard to know the jobs out there. To simplify, every company does two things:
Build product
Sell product
At its inception, The Takeoff started because there are plenty of resources for students interested in investment banking and consulting, but not enough for those interested in startups. Over time, the newsletter shifted toward healthcare, but this piece is a return to our roots. I’ll break down the key roles across sales and engineering, so you know what’s out there and where you might fit.
Sales
The function of sales is to sell the product that engineering makes. Sales covers the full customer lifecycle, not just closing deals. There are a number of different roles within the sales function, which I break into:
Marketing: Generates top-of-funnel demand and brand awareness, creating the conditions for sales to happen through content, events, ads, or partnerships.
Business Development Representatives (BDRs) (Sales Development Representatives (SDRs)): BDRs prospect, finding potential customers and getting them interested enough to take a meeting with AEs. Prospecting falls into two buckets, and most BDR teams handle both:
Outbound: Cold/warm emails, calls to contacts
Inbound: Engaging with and qualifying leads who’ve raised their hand
Account Executives (AEs): Once a BDR books a meeting, the AE runs demos, handles objections, negotiates, and gets a contract signed.
Implementation: Once a deal is closed, implementation manages onboarding.
Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs): Engineers who work directly with customers, writing custom code, building integrations, and solving technical problems specific to a customer’s environment. This one could go in the engineer bucket too.
Deployment Specialists: Similar to implementation and more operational than FDEs - configuration, data migration, and training to get customers live. Palantir popularized both of these roles.
Customer Success: Making sure customers stay happy, keep using the product, and expand their contract over time.
Engineering
The function of engineering is to build the product that sales sells:
Product Manager (PM): Decides what gets built and why. They translate customer problems into product requirements and prioritize what matters most.
Design (aka Product Design, User Experience (UX)): How the product looks and feels. Good design makes the product easy to use.
Software Engineers: Build the product across…
Front End: What the user sees and interacts with (e.g., buttons, pages, layouts).
Back End: The infrastructure and logic running underneath (e.g., databases, APIs, servers).
DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE): Keeps the product running reliably, managing infrastructure, deployments, uptime, and security, so the engineering team can ship fast without things breaking in production.
Conclusion
This breakdown covers SaaS companies specifically. Services businesses (e.g., consulting firms, agencies, staffing companies) have an operations function that doesn’t exist in SaaS. In a services company, the people are the product. In a SaaS company, the digital product is the product.