Dir, Solutions Engineering (Central/West)

Role overview Lead and develop a regional Solutions Engineering team supporting enterprise opportunities across the Central and Western United States. This player-coach role combines team leadership and repeatable sales engineering practices with direct technical involvement in complex customer evaluations, from architecture discussions to proof-of-concept planning.

Responsibilities - Coach the team on customer discovery, product demonstrations, proof-of-concept planning, and executive communication. - Lead technical reviews and address objections for the region’s most complex opportunities. - Set regional priorities for technical sales engagement and define customer-agreed success criteria for evaluations. - Work with sales leaders on account plans, team coverage, deal reviews, and forecast quality. - Develop reusable discovery guides, reference architectures, demo environments, and evaluation playbooks. - Bring customer and competitive feedback to product and engineering teams, and represent the technical work at community events and workshops.

Requirements - At least 8 years in technical presales for infrastructure software, including 3 or more years managing solutions engineering teams. - A record of hiring and developing engineers and improving technical win rates or proof-of-concept conversion. - Hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes, cloud-native infrastructure, service mesh, API gateways, L4/L7 networking, mutual TLS, and zero-trust security. - Experience with complex enterprise sales involving platform, infrastructure, or security stakeholders, including open-source or open-core sales. - Familiarity with a structured sales methodology and the ability to coach others in its use. - Strong presentation and communication skills, with the ability to work with both senior engineers and executive buyers. - Based in the Central or Western United States and willing to travel within the region.

Nice to have - Experience with Gateway API, Cilium or eBPF, or other service mesh and API gateway products. - Knowledge of AI/LLM workloads or agent infrastructure, such as model gateways, MCP/A2A, and access governance. - Experience in the CNCF ecosystem, at an open-core infrastructure company, or in a regulated industry. - A computer science degree or related education, or equivalent practical experience.