Director, Solutions Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Lead and manage a team of Solutions Engineers across the Central and West regions.

• Provide coaching to the team on discovery, demonstrations, proof of concept (POC) strategies, and executive communication.

• Serve as the technical executive sponsor for the region's largest and most intricate opportunities.

• Facilitate architecture sessions, conduct design reviews, and handle objections.

• Take ownership of the technical win in the region and define POC success criteria.

• Collaborate with regional sales leadership on account strategies, SE coverage, deal evaluations, and forecasting accuracy.

• Create discovery frameworks, reference architectures, demo environments, and POC playbooks.

• Position Solo against open source DIY solutions, hyperscaler offerings, and competing infrastructure, API gateway, and service mesh vendors.

• Share customer and competitive insights with product management, engineering, and marketing teams.

• Represent Solo at customer workshops, meetups, industry events, and through the creation of technical content.

⛳️ Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in technical pre-sales within the infrastructure software domain.

• 3+ years of direct management experience with Solutions Engineers.

• Demonstrated success in hiring, developing SEs, and enhancing technical win rates or POC conversion rates.

• Extensive hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes, agentic infrastructure, service mesh technologies such as Istio, API gateways like Envoy, L4/L7 networking, mTLS, and zero-trust security.

• Experience selling to enterprise platform engineering, infrastructure, and security teams in complex, multi-stakeholder environments.

• Familiarity with open source or open-core sales strategies.

• Proficiency in formal sales methodologies such as MEDDPICC or Command of the Message.

• Excellent communication and presentation abilities.

• Based in the Central or West US, with a willingness to travel to customers and events within the region.

• Experience with Gateway API, Cilium/eBPF, or other API gateway or service mesh products is a plus.

• Working knowledge of AI/LLM workloads or agent infrastructure is advantageous.

• Background in a CNCF-ecosystem or open-core infrastructure company, or experience in a regulated industry, is a plus.

• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

🏝️ Benefits

• Equal Opportunity Employer.

• Fun and dynamic work environment.

• Collaborative opportunities with customers, partners, and open source communities.

• Hands-on training and engagement in architectural best practices with customers.