Pre-Sales Engineer

Open (YC W24); Netherlands; On-site; EUR 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Open is seeking a Pre-Sales Engineer to bridge Sales, Product and Engineering for enterprise opportunities. You will understand customer tech environments, design credible Open solutions and lead technical discovery calls.

In this role you will build demos, pilots and proofs of concept, discuss security and data flows, and coordinate with customer teams to ensure a clean handoff to implementation during fast-moving sales cycles.

Qualifications

• Experience in solutions engineering or pre-sales roles.
• Ability to read API documentation and test APIs.
• Strong communication and presentation skills.

Responsibilities

• Join enterprise sales calls and lead technical discovery with prospects
• Design proposed Open solutions around each customer's use case
• Build customized demos and proofs of concepts
• Explain Open architecture, AI stack, security model to stakeholders
• Ensure clean handoff from Sales to implementation

Skills

APIs

REST

Webhooks

Integrations

Security

AI concepts

Tools

Postman

Job description

About Open

Open is building an AI-native customer experience platform that helps companies automate and manage customer communication across chat, email, WhatsApp, and voice. Our customers include fast-growing technology companies and global enterprises across fintech, commerce, logistics, travel, and other industries.

About Open

Open is building an AI-native customer experience platform that helps companies automate and manage customer communication across chat, email, WhatsApp, and voice. Our customers include fast-growing technology companies and global enterprises across fintech, commerce, logistics, travel, and other industries.

We are looking for a strong Pre-Sales Engineer who can work closely with our commercial team and prospective customers to turn complex requirements into clear, technically credible solutions.

The Role

As a Pre-Sales Engineer at Open, you will sit between Sales, Product, Engineering, and the customer. Your job is to deeply understand a prospect's technical environment, workflows, integrations, security requirements, and business objectives, then design and demonstrate how Open can solve them.

You will be heavily involved in enterprise sales cycles, from the first technical discovery call through solution design, demos, pilots, security reviews, and handoff to implementation.

This is not a role where you simply give standard product demos. You should be comfortable understanding complex systems, APIs, enterprise software, AI agents, telephony, workflows, and customer support infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Join enterprise sales calls and lead technical discovery with prospects
• Understand the customer's existing architecture, systems, workflows, integrations, and operational requirements
• Design proposed Open solutions around each customer's use case
• Build highly customized demos and proof of concepts for strategic opportunities
• Configure AI agents, workflows, integrations, APIs, and automations for demos and pilots
• Explain Open's architecture, AI stack, integrations, security model, infrastructure, and data flows to technical stakeholders
• Work with customer engineering, security, IT, operations, and procurement teams
• Answer technical questions during RFPs, security reviews, vendor assessments, and procurement processes
• Work with Open's engineering and product teams when a deal requires new functionality or deeper technical validation
• Help define technical scope and success criteria for pilots and proof of concepts
• Identify technical risks early in the sales process and help resolve them before they block a deal
• Support integrations with platforms such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Intercom, Genesys, ServiceNow, CRMs, ERPs, payment platforms, and internal APIs
• Help customers understand how Open can interact with their backend systems through APIs, MCP, webhooks, workflows, and custom integrations
• Demonstrate AI voice, email, chat, WhatsApp, workflow automation, and agentic use cases
• Create reusable technical documentation, demo environments, architectures, and solution patterns for the sales team
• Provide structured feedback from prospects to Product and Engineering
• Ensure a clean technical handoff from Sales to the implementation and customer success teams

What Success Looks Like

Within your first few months, you should be able to independently take ownership of the technical side of an enterprise opportunity. You should be able to join a discovery call, understand the customer's environment, identify the right architecture, build a compelling demo or pilot, answer technical objections, and move the customer toward deployment.

Over time, you will help us make our enterprise sales process faster and more scalable by creating reusable architectures, demos, documentation, and technical sales playbooks.

Who You Will Work With

• Account Executives and the commercial team
• Founders
• Product and engineering
• Implementation and customer success
• Customer engineering and IT teams
• Security, compliance, and procurement stakeholders

Requirements

What We Are Looking For

• Strong technical background and ability to understand complex software systems quickly
• Experience in solutions engineering, pre-sales engineering, solutions architecture, implementation engineering, or a similar customer-facing technical role
• Strong understanding of APIs, REST, webhooks, authentication, integrations, and modern SaaS architecture
• Comfortable reading API documentation and testing APIs using tools such as Postman or similar tools
• Ability to build lightweight integrations, scripts, or prototypes when necessary
• Good understanding of AI and LLM-based systems
• Comfortable explaining technical AI concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Strong communication and presentation skills
• Ability to run technical discovery sessions independently
• Ability to understand a customer's problem and translate it into a technical architecture
• Comfortable working directly with large enterprise customers
• Comfortable operating in fast-moving sales cycles where requirements can change quickly
• Strong ownership mentality and willingness to do whatever is necessary to move an opportunity forward

Nice to Have

• Experience with customer experience or customer support platforms such as Salesforce Service Cloud, Zendesk, Intercom, Genesys, Talkdesk, or ServiceNow
• Experience with contact centers, telephony, SIP, VoIP, or voice AI
• Experience with enterprise security, SSO, SAML, OAuth, RBAC, and data residency requirements
• Experience working with regulated industries such as financial services, payments, telecommunications, or healthcare
• Experience with cloud infrastructure such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or Oracle Cloud
• Basic coding ability in JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, or a similar language
• Experience building or deploying AI agents or LLM applications

The Ideal Person

The ideal person is technical enough to sit with a customer's engineering team and commercial enough to understand what actually matters in a sales process. You enjoy getting into the details, building things yourself, talking to customers, and turning complicated requirements into simple solutions.

You should be equally comfortable presenting to a CTO, debugging an API integration, building an AI demo, and helping an Account Executive close an enterprise deal.