Head of Sales Engineering

assembledhq; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 370,000; Full time

Job summary

Assembled is seeking a founding sales engineering leadership candidate to own the technical side of how we win deals. You will start with one SE and build the function, hiring and shaping the team as you go.

You will partner with Account Executives to run technical evaluations, demonstrate value with AI agents, and own the demo environments. This is a high-visibility, hands-on leadership role based in San Francisco and New York with direct exposure to executives.

Qualifications

• Experience leading sales engineering teams and hiring
• Proven success closing large enterprise deals (≥$500K)
• Ability to translate complex product value into compelling demos

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the sales engineering team, set metrics
• Partner with Account Executives for evaluations and deals
• Build demo environments, discovery frameworks, and POC playbooks
• Own the technical win end-to-end from discovery to close
• Manage RFP responses and security assessments
• Bridge customer needs with product roadmap and GTM content
• Collaborate with sales leadership on pipeline patterns and strategy

Skills

Sales engineering leadership

Enterprise deals

Pre-sales

Job description

About Assembled

Assembled helps companies scale great customer support. As consumers, we've all been there. You need help, you're stuck on hold or going in circles with an AI, and your problem still isn't solved.

Behind great support is a complex operational problem: thousands of people and AI agents working across teams, time zones, and products as new problems emerge. Assembled gives support leaders the tools to manage that complexity, from AI agents that resolve customer issues to software that forecasts demand, builds schedules, and makes intraday adjustments.

More than 400 companies, including DoorDash, Salesforce, Stripe, and Sephora, trust Assembled. We've raised $71M from NEA, Emergence Capital, Stripe, and Basis Set Ventures and have offices in San Francisco, New York, and London.

The Role

This is the founding sales engineering leadership role at Assembled. You'll own the technical side of how we win deals, and from day one that means getting your hands dirty in the ones that matter most. You'll also build the sales engineering function from the ground up and shape the team your way, starting with one sales engineer and the green light to hire more. You've done this before, ideally more than once, and you know what a high-performing SE function looks like at scale.

You'll partner with Account Executives to run technical evaluations, prove out Assembled against real customer data and workflows, and turn complex support operations problems into clear, compelling demonstrations of value delivered. A big share of that work centers on our AI agents for chat, voice and email. You'll show prospects how those agents resolve real customer issues inside their existing support stack, and how they work alongside the human teams Assembled already helps them run.

The best SE leaders don't want to step out of the deals, they want to be in them. You'll stay hands‑on and carry a reduced quota because we want someone who still loves deal execution and the learnings that come from it. Alongside that, you'll stand up the demo environments, the discovery frameworks, the proof‑of‑concept playbooks and the technical content that help the whole GTM team move faster. You'll be the technical voice our prospects trust and the bridge between what customers need and what product builds next.

This is a high-priority, cross‑functional role with exposure to executive leadership and a large level of responsibility that will help accelerate your career. We're in‑person 5 days a week from our bright, airy offices in the Mission (San Francisco) and Chelsea Market (New York).

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the sales engineering team. Hire, coach and develop sales engineers, and define the metrics the function is measured by, such as technical win rate, POC conversion and time-to-value.
• Partner with Account Executives to drive technical evaluations from discovery through proof of concept to close, and run our largest and most strategic deals yourself, especially early on, to get your product knowledge and command of the platform to world‑class.
• Build the function's foundations: demo environments, discovery frameworks, POC playbooks and reusable technical content that scale the whole team.
• Own the technical win end to end. Lead discovery to understand each customer's business context and goals, propose the right technical solution across our AI agents and workforce products, run tailored demos, and prove value delivered against real data and workflows.
• Own RFP and security assessment responses, and build the processes and content that make them repeatable as the team grows.
• Act as the bridge between prospects and product. Bring hard customer evidence back so it shapes the roadmap, and partner with product marketing on technical content and competitive positioning.
• Partner with sales leadership on the pipeline as a whole and on individual deals. Spot the patterns in where we win and where deals stall, and shape the technical strategy for the opportunities that matter most.

About You

• You're an analytical operator who likes hard problems: You'd rather solve a prospect's problem than talk about it. You bring significant technical and pre‑sales experience, and messy data or complex integrations get you going. Assembled is a wide and deep product, so you'll need real analytical range and strong critical thinking to reason across all of it.
• You've closed large enterprise deals (required): You've led the technical side of complex enterprise sales cycles and have won deals of $500K or more in upfront value. This is a hard requirement for the role. You're as effective with a C‑level exec as you are with an engineer or a support agent.
• You've built the function before: You've stood up or scaled a sales engineering team from scratch, ideally more than once. You've seen what works and what doesn't, and you know how to get there.
• You lead by doing: You've managed or mentored sales engineers, and you still love carrying a number and bei