Director, Sales Engineering

Nightfall AI; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Nightfall AI, an AI-native data loss prevention platform, is seeking a Director of Sales Engineering on the West Coast. You will lead three SEs across Enterprise and Commercial, stay hands-on with demos and labs, and ensure technical wins are clear at the negotiating table.

You’ll partner with the CRO to scale SE capacity, build playbooks, and enable AEs, while translating field feedback into product improvements. Travel to events and customer sites is expected.

Qualifications

• Experience leading SE teams in high-growth security companies.
• Ability to run technical demos and build labs.
• Proven track record selling cybersecurity/data security to CISOs.
• Deep knowledge of SaaS apps, APIs, endpoints and cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Experience creating SE playbooks and enablement programs.
• Ability to incorporate field feedback into product changes.
• Channel-partner experience and travel willingness.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the SE team across Enterprise and Commercial.
• Stay hands-on with demos, deep dives and proofs of value.
• Create discovery guides, demo flows and lab environments.
• Lead enablement for AEs, SEs and partners.
• Close the loop with product and engineering on requested features.
• Collaborate with CRO to plan capacity and process as we scale.
• Represent Nightfall at events and customer meetings.

Skills

SE leadership

Hands-on demos

Technical depth

Executive presentations

Channel partnerships

Travel willingness

Tools

Lab environments

Job description

About Nightfall:

Nightfall is the AI-native, unified data loss prevention and insider risk management platform that protects sensitive data across SaaS apps, GenAI tools, email, endpoint devices, and more. Hundreds of customers, spanning AI innovators to top 10 banks, trust Nightfall to detect and stop data exfiltration at scale. Nightfall enables organizations to innovate freely without the risks of losing intellectual property or exposing customer data. Our agentic platform helps security teams regain their time by putting data loss prevention on autopilot. With automatic remediation, security violations can be resolved automatically before they become incidents, and end-users can be automatically trained and coached in the moment to self-heal violations that they introduce.

Nightfall is backed by leading VC firms including Bain Capital Ventures (Enrique Salem - former CEO of Symantec), Venrock (early investors in Cloudflare), WestBridge Capital, Pear VC (early investors in Dropbox and Doordash), and a cadre of cybersecurity leaders including Frederic Kerrest (founder of Okta), Maynard Webb (former COO of eBay), Ryan Carlson (President of Chainguard), Kevin Mandia (founder of Mandiant), and many others.

About the role:

We're hiring a Director of Sales Engineering to lead our SE team and shape how Nightfall wins technically. You'll lead three SEs covering Enterprise and Commercial deals, and you'll stay hands‑on: running demos, building labs and jumping into the deals where you can make the difference.

Enterprises are deploying AI tools and agents faster than their security programs can keep up, and buyers want to see how Nightfall protects their data across people, AI agents, SaaS, email and endpoints. You'll make sure every technical evaluation shows that clearly, and you'll bring what you hear in the field back to our product and engineering teams.

This is a player‑coach role. You'll work closely with our CRO on how sales engineering scales as we grow.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Lead and grow the SE team. Manage, coach and develop three SEs across Enterprise and Commercial. Set coverage, run deal and demo reviews, and hire as the team grows.

• Stay hands‑on. Run demos, technical deep dives and proofs of value on key deals, and step in when a technical win is on the line.

• Build the SE playbook. Create the discovery guides, demo flows, POV frameworks and lab environments that our team and channel partners use to win.

• Run sales and product enablement. Lead regular sessions so AEs, SEs and partners can position new releases and handle technical objections.

• Close the loop with product and engineering. Capture field feedback, feature requests and losses, show their impact, and work with product and engineering on what gets built next.

• Partner with our CRO. Shape plans for SE capacity, coverage and process as we scale and accelerate growth.

• Show up in the field. Travel to industry events and customer meetings as needed, and represent Nightfall with CISOs and security teams.

• Work AI-forward. Use tools like Claude to speed up demo prep, RFPs, POV reporting and enablement.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

• Sales engineering leadership experience, including managing SEs, ideally at a high‑growth security company.
• You're still hands‑on. You can run a technical demo or POV yourself, and you've built demo environments or labs.
• Experience selling cybersecurity, ideally data security, DLP, SSE/CASB, insider risk or endpoint, to CISOs and security teams.
• Technical depth across SaaS applications and APIs, endpoint agents, browsers and cloud environments (AWS, Azure or GCP).
• A track record of building SE playbooks and running enablement that improved win rates or ramp time.
• Experience turning field feedback into product changes, working closely with product and engineering leaders.
• Experience working with channel partners and their SEs. We're a channel‑first company.
• Comfort presenting to executives and representing your company at events, and willingness to travel for events and customer meetings.
• Located on the West coast preferred

BONUS POINTS

• Experience with AI security, or securing AI tools and agents.
• You've built an SE function from the ground up at a Series A to C company.
• Scripting or automation experience (Python, APIs, infrastructure as code).

Environment

Nightfall AI takes pride in being an equal‑opportunity employer. We value a diverse and global talent pool and the collaboration that results from having a diverse and inclusive team. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. Our hiring decisions are based exclusively on merit, qualifications, and business needs.

Compensation

Employee compensation will be determined based on interview performance, level of experience, specialization of skills, and market rate. During the offer discussion, your recruiter will review the finalized base salary, bonus (for applicable roles), benefits & perks, and stock options as they’ll be reflected in the offer letter.