Dir, Solutions Engineering
Solo.io · Remote US
About this role
**Who we are** Solo.io is reimagining infrastructure for cloud and AI—secure, seamless cloud connectivity with AI-ready, agentic infrastructure. Enterprises worldwide trust us to securely connect their applications, services, and AI workloads across any environment. Joining Solo means working at the center of how enterprises adopt AI: on open source projects built in the open with a global community. **About the role** The **Director, Solutions Engineering** is a player-coach leadership role responsible for winning the technical evaluation in every deal across our **Central and West** regions. You’ll lead a team of Solutions Engineers, partner with regional sales leadership, and stay hands-on enough to lead architecture sessions and POCs on our most complex opportunities. **What you’ll do** - Lead and develop a team of Solutions Engineers across the Central and West regions, setting a high technical bar and coaching on discovery, demos, POC strategy, and executive communication. - Act as the technical executive sponsor on the region’s largest and most complex opportunities—leading architecture sessions, design reviews, and objection handling. - Own the technical win in region: decide which deals to go deep on vs. qualify out, and set clear POC success criteria with customers before work begins. - Partner with regional sales leadership on account strategy, SE coverage, deal reviews, and forecast accuracy. - Build repeatable assets such as discovery frameworks, reference architectures, demo environments, and POC playbooks. - Position Solo against open source DIY, hyperscaler offerings, and other agentic infrastructure, API gateway, and service mesh vendors. - Be the voice of the field—bringing structured customer and competitive feedback to product, engineering, and marketing. - Represent Solo in the community through customer workshops, meetups, industry events, and technical content creation. **Job requirements** - **8+ years** of experience in technical pre-sales (Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Solutions Architect, or Field Engineer) for infrastructure software, including **3+ years** directly managing SEs. - Proven record of hiring and developing SEs and measurably improving technical win rate or POC conversion. - Deep, hands-on expertise in cloud-native technologies: **Kubernetes**, agentic infrastructure, **service mesh** (e.g., Istio), and **API gateways** (e.g., Envoy), plus **L4/L7 networking**, **mTLS**, and **zero-trust security**. - Experience selling to enterprise platform engineering, infrastructure, and security teams on complex, multi-stakeholder deals. - Experience in an open source or open-core sales motion, converting community users into enterprise customers. - Fluency in a formal sales methodology (MEDDPICC, Command of the Message, or similar) and ability to coach the team to use it. - Strong communication and presentation skills with the ability to engage principal engineers and executive buyers. - Located in the **Central or West US**, with willingness to travel to customers and events in region. - Plus: Gateway API, Cilium/eBPF, or other gateway/service mesh experience. - Plus: Working knowledge of AI/LLM workloads or agent infrastructure (model gateways, MCP/A2A, agent access governance). - Plus: Background at a CNCF ecosystem or open-core infrastructure company, or experience in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, telco). - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field, or equi
Listing freshness
CronJobs last confirmed this listing 1h ago. If its source stops confirming the opening for seven days, this page is removed from active inventory.