Senior Sales Engineer (Pre-Sales)

ZeroTier, Inc.; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Hybrid work environment

Equity compensation

Retirement savings plan

25 holiday days

Flexible work hours

Career Enhancement Funds

Job summary

ZeroTier, Inc. is seeking a Senior Sales Engineer to partner with Account Executives and become the trusted technical advisor across Europe, Africa, and beyond. You’ll own discovery, solution architecture, demos, and proof-of-value engagements end-to-end, then hand off to Customer Success.

You will run POVs, design success criteria, and deliver compelling demonstrations to diverse audiences, from engineers to procurement executives, while navigating NDA frameworks and RFP responses.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in a customer-facing, pre-sales role attached to a sales team.
• Excellent discovery skills; ability to uncover real problems and qualify fit.
• Executive presence; ability to present to both engineers and board-level buyers.
• POV/pilot management with clear success criteria and mutual action plans.
• Fluent professional English with strong written communication.
• Ability to translate complex concepts into business value for non-cryptographers.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical win across the deal cycle: discovery, demos, POV design and execution, technical close.
• Run structured POVs with clear success criteria, mutual action plans, timelines, and exit decisions.
• Deliver demos and whiteboard sessions for audiences from hands-on engineers to CISOs and procurement executives.
• Win competitive deals by articulating ZeroTier's advantages and limitations.
• Answer RFPs/RFIs and security questionnaires translating standards into concrete architecture.
• Architect across hosted and self-hosted modes and SW components; bridge to Engineering when needed.
• Build demo environments, reference architectures, and POV runbooks for GTM speed.
• Feed field voice into product with win/loss patterns and roadmap input.

Skills

Pre-sales engineering

Discovery skills

Executive presence

POV management

Written communication

Fluent English

Ambiguity tolerance

Client storytelling

Tools

Wireshark

tcpdump

Linux

AWS

Azure

GCP

Python

Job description

Opening

Senior Sales Engineer is a pre-sales, customer-facing role working closely with the Sales team. You'll spend your days in discovery calls, demos, POVs, and deal strategy — not in a NOC or writing production code, but you will also participate in post-sales technical escalation support on occasion, as well as collaborate with customer success and customer onboarding requests. This is not a software or network architect role. Pre-sales Engineering experience is required.

About ZeroTier

ZeroTier leads the world in next-generation connectivity and cybersecurity. Our platform provides highly secure, peer-to-peer virtual networks relied upon by millions of users and businesses - from individual users and startups to mid-scale enterprises and Fortune 500 companies. We’re backed by awesome investors including Battery Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, and Anorak Ventures.

The Role

You are the technical counterpart to our Account Executives and the trusted advisor to buyers across Europe, Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world — from a founder connecting a fleet of Raspberry Pis, to an industrial OT team bridging PLCs across plants, to a defense integrator architecting an air-gapped, post-quantum secure sovereign network. You own the technical win: discovery, solution architecture, demos, and proof-of-value engagements end-to-end, then hand off cleanly to Customer Success.

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical win across the deal cycle: discovery and qualification with AEs, demo, POV design and execution, technical close
• Run structured POVs with clear success criteria, mutual action plans, timelines, and exit decisions — for deployments from ten nodes to tens of thousands
• Deliver demos and whiteboard sessions that land with audiences from hands-on network engineers to CISOs and procurement executives
• Win competitive deals — articulating where ZeroTier beats WireGuard-based stacks and legacy VPN/SD-WAN vendors, and being honest about where it doesn't
• Answer RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires, translating NIST, European, and NATO, and post-quantum readiness requirements into concrete architecture answers
• Architect across our full surface area: hosted Central, self-hosted controllers, flow rules, bridging, multipath, SSO/OIDC, and ZeroTier Quantum's SaaS, sovereign, and air-gapped modes
• Bridge to Engineering when deals need it — reproduce issues, capture evidence, elevate defects and feature gaps
• Build the SE machine: demo environments, reference architectures, battle cards, and POV runbooks that make the whole go-to-market team faster
• Feed the field's voice into the product: structured win/loss insights, deployment patterns, roadmap input

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years “customer-facing” in a pre-sales role — Sales Engineer, Solutions Engineer, or Solutions Architect attached to a sales team and a quota. You can point to deals you helped win and explain your role in winning them.
• Excellent discovery skills: you ask the second and third question, uncover the real problem, and disqualify gracefully when there isn't a fit
• Executive presence and range — equally credible whiteboarding Layer 2 internals with a network architect and presenting risk and ROI to a board-level audience
• POV/pilot management as a discipline: success criteria, mutual action plans, crisp status communication, on-time execution in parallel
• Excellent written communication — architecture docs, follow-up summaries, and RFP responses that are clear, polished, and technically precise
• Fluent professional English — with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly with customers across Europe and other parts of the world. Additional languages are a plus
• A builder's mindset for a :30+-person company: low ego, high ownership, comfortable with ambiguity

The technical bar (you'll be tested on this, conversationally):

• Strong networking fundamentals: Layer 2 vs. Layer 3 behavior, routing, NAT and NAT traversal, firewalls, DNS, and overlay/underlay separation
• Comfort at the packet level — Wireshark/tcpdump is a working tool, not a party trick
• Solid Linux and real cloud experience (AWS/Azure/GCP): VPCs, routing, security groups, hybrid connectivity
• Hands-on familiarity with at least two of: SD-WAN, ZTNA, VPN technologies (WireGuard, IPsec, OpenVPN), container networking, or embedded/IoT connectivity
• Working knowledge of SSO/identity (OIDC, SAML, Entra ID/Okta) as it intersects with network access
• Scripting fluency (Python, Bash) — enough to automate a demo environment and exercise a REST API. ( Rust exp is nice but not critical)
• The ability to translate all of the above into plain-language business value for a non-cryptographer audience

Nice to have

• Selling into defense, government, or regulated sectors (national Ministries of Defence, NATO, EU institutions, GovCloud, sovereign infrastructure)
• Familiarity with European cybersecurity and regulatory frameworks, such as NIS2, DORA, the EU Cyber Resilience Act, and European digital sovereignty requirements.
• Background in OT/industrial environments (Modbus, IEC-61850, SCADA)
• Prior work at an overlay networking, mesh VPN, ZTNA, or SD-WAN vendor
• Experience as a first or early SE hire — building the function, not just running plays
• A working grasp of modern cryptography and the quantum threat model — why "harvest now, decrypt later" makes PQC a today problem — and familiarity with the NIST PQC standards (FIPS 203/204/205), hybrid schemes, and the CNSA 2.0 compliance landscape. Most importantly: the ability to translate this into plain-language business value without overselling
• Familiarity with the NIST post-quantum standards (FIPS 203 / ML-KEM, FIPS 204 / ML-DSA, FIPS 205 / SLH-DSA), hybrid classical + PQC schemes, and crypto-agility as an architectural principle
• Awareness of the compliance landscape driving adoption: CNSA 2.0, European and NATO cryptographic requirements, and emerging PQC mandates across government and regulated industries

How We Work

You'll report to the Director of Pre-Sales Engineering & Customer Success and partner daily with Sales, Engineering, and Customer Success. Remote-first, with occasional travel for key customer engagements, POV kickoffs, and industry events. We move quickly, write things down, and hold a high bar for what we put in front of customers.

Important: This is a hybrid role based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, with three days per week in our office at Utrecht Central Station and two days working from home.

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Hybrid work environment: we work 3 days at our office at Utrecht Central Station and 2 days from home
• Equity compensation package
• Retirement savings plan with employer contribution
• 25 holiday days of PTO per year
• Flexible work hours (subject to management approval)
• Career Enhancement Funds as well as a generous Employee Referral Bonus