Principal Solution Engineer / Solution Architect

Certiv; Seattle, Northern (WA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful early-employee equity

Competitive base salary

Comprehensive health benefits

Flexible time off

Remote-friendly with ~20% travel

Job summary

Certiv is building its first dedicated technical GTM hire in Seattle, offering a senior seat to define four roles. You will advise C-level executives, architect joint solutions, and shape Certiv’s public technical voice.

You’ll own early customer success and expansion strategy, driving measurable value from the platform. You’ll lead solution engineering, evangelism, and TAM efforts, with Seattle HQ or US-wide remote work and ~20% travel.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in a technical field role across security, infra, or developer tools.
• Proven ability to sell across security, IT, and engineering buyer motions.
• Hands-on fluency with AI agent landscape and related tooling.

Responsibilities

• Run live demos and design POC criteria for buyers.
• Build and maintain demo environment and self-serve eval paths.
• Design reference architectures with Certiv and partner ecosystems.
• Drive joint solution work with technology partners and architects.
• Own partner SE discussions and Certiv playbook development.
• Create and deliver product training for resellers and partners.

Skills

Sales Engineering

Solution Architecture

Developer Relations

Technical Marketing

Job description

Certiv’s endpoint-resident architecture pairs Scout (our endpoint agent) with an intent-based policy engine to give security and engineering leaders complete visibility, pre-execution control, and intent-aware policy across every agent on every surface. We emerged from stealth in March 2026 with backing from Aviso, Founders’ Co-op, and Fortson, and we’re already in production with design-partner deployments across enterprise software, healthtech, and gaming.

The Role

We’re bringing on our first dedicated technical GTM hire. This isn’t a traditional SE role; it’s a senior seat with the scope of four jobs and the authority to define how all of them get done at Certiv.

You will operate as a key technical leader, acting as a strategic advisor to C-level executives (CISOs, CIOs, VPs of Engineering) and platform architects evaluating Certiv. You will define and architect joint solutions with our ecosystem partners across the security, identity, and AI landscapes. You will build Certiv’s public technical voice, shaping the market’s understanding of AI agent assurance through deep-dive publications and presentations. Finally, you will own the technical success and expansion strategy for our earliest customers, ensuring they achieve measurable, long-term value from the platform.

If you’ve ever wanted to help define a category from the inside, and work with a great team defining a new market segment, this is that seat.

What You’ll Do

Solution Engineering (~40%)

• Run live demos for security, IT, and engineering buyers from first technical conversation through POC design and exit criteria.
• Build, improve, and maintain the demo environment, scripted scenarios, and self-serve evaluation paths.
• Partner with the leadership (founders and product) on every active deal; over time, run technical evaluations independently and collaborate closely with Product Management and Engineering to expand the product.
• Design reference architectures showing Certiv alongside other industry vendors across Identity, DLP, SIEM, MCP, cloud, AI vendors, and other parts of the customer stack.
• Drive joint solution work with technology partners: integrations, co-sell motions, and architecture documents.
• Own technical conversations with partner SE and architecture teams; build the Certiv-side playbook for joint wins.
• Develop and deliver product training and enablement to resellers and technology partners.

Technical Evangelism & Marketing (~25%)

• Build a public technical voice around AI agent assurance and author technical content: blog posts, deep-dives, conference talks, webinar series, demo videos.
• Partner with the product team to shape how new capabilities are positioned, demonstrated, and explained.
• Represent Certiv at major security and AI industry events such as RSA, Black Hat, DEF CON, AI Engineer Summit, and similar leading conferences.

Technical Account Management (~15%)

• Be the technical owner for our flagship design-partner accounts through onboarding, expansion, and renewal.
• Run quarterly technical reviews; surface usage patterns, policy improvements, and expansion paths.
• Work closely with product management and engineering to triage product issues and turn customer signal into prioritized roadmap input.

The weighting will shift as we scale. Early on, expect heavier demo and TAM load; over time, more evangelism, partner architecture work, and eventually the opportunity to build the team behind you.

Who You Are

You’ve done some version of this before and you want a bigger canvas. Specifically:

• 10+ years in a technical field role, such as Sales Engineering, Solution Architecture, Developer Relations, or Technical Marketing at a security, infrastructure, or developer tools company.
• Demonstrated ability to sell across all three of our buyer motions: Security (CISO, security architects, GRC), IT (CIO, IT operations, endpoint and identity teams), and Engineering (VP Eng, platform engineering, developer experience). You’ve sat across the table from each and can adapt your demo, framing, and technical depth to the room.
• Hands-on fluency with the AI agent landscape, where you’ve built with or evaluated coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.), productivity tools (Claude Cowork, OpenClaw), MCP servers, and agentic frameworks. You understand the difference between an LLM call and an agent execution, and why that difference matters for security.
• Real security, infrastructure, and AI chops. You can talk credibly about endpoint architecture, identity, proxies and TLS inspection, eBPF, EDR, SASE, or zero trust with practitioners who do this for a living.
• Strong demo and presentation craft: you can hold a room of skeptical security architects and a room of curious engineering leaders, often in the same week.
• Concept and category builder. You don’t just explain existing products; you help define new ones. You can take emerging technology and give it the language, frameworks, and architectural patterns that customers, partners, and analysts adopt. AI agent security is being defined in real time, and you want to be one of the people defining it.
• Zero-to-one mindset. You want to be first, you’re comfortable when the playbook doesn’t exist yet, and you’ll write it as you go.

Nice to have: prior early-stage startup experience (pre-Series B), background with developer-facing or runtime security products, an existing public voice (talks, posts, OSS contributions), or time spent inside one of our ecosystem partners.

What We Offer

• Meaningful early-employee equity in a seed-stage company.
• Competitive base salary, calibrated to your level and geography.
• Comprehensive health benefits and flexible time off.
• Direct working relationship with the founding team.
• Seattle HQ or remote within the US; expect ~20% travel for customer meetings, partner work, and events.
• A category that needs a technical voice, and the runway to be that voice.

Certiv is an equal opportunity employer. We hire for what you can do and how you think, not where you’ve been.