Director, Solutions Engineering – AI-Driven Cloud Wins

Solo.io, Inc.

United States

Remote

USD 180,000 - 250,000

Full time

2 days ago

Be an early applicant

A complete application in a minute

Tailored resume and cover letter, ready to send.

Get past ATS filters

Job summary

Solo.io is seeking a Director of Solutions Engineering in the Central/West US to lead a high‑impact SE team. You will drive discovery, demos, POC strategy, and executive communications, while hands‑on guiding architecture sessions for complex deals.

You will sponsor the largest opportunities, set POC criteria, and partner with sales on strategy and forecasts. You will build repeatable assets and compete with open source or hyperscaler offerings in major enterprise deals.

Qualifications

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, including Kubernetes, agentic infrastructure, service mesh (Istio), and API gateways (Envoy), along with 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 the ability to coach a team to use it.
Strong communication and presentation skills, with the ability to engage both principal engineers and executive buyers.
Located in the Central or West US, with willingness to travel to customers and events in region.
Experience with Gateway API, Cilium/eBPF, or another API gateway or service mesh product is a plus.
Working knowledge of AI/LLM workloads or agent infrastructure (model gateways, MCP/A2A, agent access governance) is a plus.
Background at a CNCF‑ecosystem or open‑core infrastructure company, or experience in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, telco), is a plus.
A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

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 technical executive sponsor on the region’s largest and most complex opportunities, leading architecture sessions, design reviews, and objection handling yourself when the deal requires it.
Own the technical win in region: decide which deals to go deep on and which to 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 agnetic infrastructure, API gateway, and service mesh vendors in competitive evaluations.
Act as the voice of the field, bringing structured customer and competitive feedback to the product management, engineering, and marketing teams.
Represent Solo in the community through customer workshops, meetups, industry events, and technical content creation.