Description
The Problem SE Solves
Enterprise buyers of AI/cyber need technical proof and trust. An Account Executive can build relationships and align on business value, but the moment a prospect's security architect or CISO asks "how does this actually work in our environment, and can you prove it won't create risk," a generalist AE either stalls the deal or gives an answer that erodes trust.
The Sales Engineer exists to remove that stall point: to be credible enough technically that skeptical buyers trust the answer, and fast enough to turn that trust into a scoped, winnable evaluation (POC) rather than an open-ended technical rabbit hole that kills momentum.
Put simply: AEs sell the vision, SEs prove it's real - and in security specifically, "prove it's real" often means proving it's safe, which is a much higher bar than a typical SaaS demo.
Key Goals
- De-risk technical objections before they stall a deal. Get ahead of architecture, security, and data-handling questions rather than reacting to them.
- Convert technical interest into a scoped, winnable evaluation. No vagueness. The SE's job is to define success criteria tight enough that a win is unambiguous.
- Shorten the technical evaluation cycle. Time-to-technical-validation is often the single biggest lever on overall sales cycle length in security deals.
- Build durable trust with technical buyers, independent of the AE relationship, technical buyers often remember and vouch for the SE specifically, which shows up in renewals/expansion later.
- Be the technical truth serum internally within Sola. flag deals that shouldn't be won (e.g., the product genuinely doesn't fit the use case) rather than overselling to hit quarter numbers.
About the Role
We're hiring a Sales Engineer to be the technical backbone of our sales process. You'll partner with Account Executives to run technical discovery, deliver compelling demos, lead proofs of concept (POCs), and answer the hard security and architecture questions prospects may ask.
This role is highly customer-facing and directly influences whether deals close.
What You'll Do
- Partner with Account Executives throughout the sales cycle: discovery, technical evaluation, POC, and close
- Run tailored product demos that map directly to a prospect's environment, threat model, and use cases
- Design, scope, and run proofs of concept - defining success criteria with the customer and making sure we hit them
- Answer technical, architecture, and security questions from prospects, including deep dives on deployment models, data handling, integrations, and model behavior
- Respond to RFPs/RFIs and complete security questionnaires in partnership with Security and Legal
- Build and maintain demo environments, sample datasets, and reusable POC assets
- Act as a trusted technical advisor to prospects - not just presenting features, but helping them think through their own security architecture
- Relay competitive intelligence, objections, and feature gaps back to Product and Marketing
- Support technical onboarding handoff to the Forward Deployed / Customer Success team post-sale
Requirements
- 3+ years of experience in a sales engineering, solutions engineering, or technical pre-sales role, ideally in cybersecurity, AI/ML, or enterprise infrastructure
- Solid understanding of security fundamentals: Cloud Security, SecOps, SIEM/SOAR, EDR, network security, cloud security, or threat detection
- Comfortable presenting to and fielding tough questions from technical buyers and executives (security architects, CISOs, engineering leads)
- Hands-on technical ability: can read/write basic scripts (Python, Bash), understand APIs, and speak credibly about cloud architecture (AWS/GCP/Azure)
- Strong communicator who can translate technical depth into business value, and vice versa
- Experience scoping and running POCs with clear, mutually agreed success criteria
- Comfortable with a fast-paced, quota-carrying-adjacent environment where your work directly affects revenue
Preffered
- Experience selling or supporting AI/LLM-based products, and ability to speak credibly about model behavior, hallucination risk, and evaluation
- Prior experience at a cybersecurity vendor (SIEM, EDR, XDR, SOAR, or similar)
- Experience with demo environment tooling and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, etc.)
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