Dir, Solutions Engineering (Central/West)

soloioinc; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Solo.io is seeking a regional Solutions Engineering leader to build and guide a high-impact team across the Central and Western United States. This role combines player-coach leadership with direct technical involvement in architecture discussions, PoC planning, and persuasive executive communications.

You will set regional priorities, drive repeatable sales engineering practices, and collaborate with sales, product, and engineering to accelerate complex enterprise opportunities.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in technical presales for infrastructure software, with 3+ years leading SE teams.
• Proven hiring and coaching of engineers, improving win rates.
• Hands-on Kubernetes and cloud-native infra knowledge, incl. security.
• Experience selling to enterprise with platform, infrastructure, or security stakeholders.
• Familiar with structured sales methodologies and coaching others.
• Strong presentation and executive communication; capable to engage senior engineers and buyers.
• Willing to travel within Central or Western US.

Responsibilities

• Coach the regional Solutions Engineering team on customer discovery, product demonstrations, and POC planning.
• Lead technical reviews and address objections for the region's complex opportunities.
• Set regional priorities for technical sales engagement and define customer-aligned success criteria.
• Collaborate with sales leaders on account plans, team coverage, deal reviews, and forecast quality.
• Develop reusable discovery guides, reference architectures, demo environments, and evaluation playbooks.
• Represent customer feedback to product and engineering, and participate in community events.

Skills

Kubernetes

Cloud-native infra

Service mesh

API gateways

L4/L7 networking

Mutual TLS

Zero-trust security

Team leadership

Hiring engineers

Education

Computer science degree or related education

Job description

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.