Sales Engineer

Valence; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Comprehensive health coverage

Generous PTO and parental leave

401k / pensions

Meaningful equity

High-performance culture

Job summary

Valence seeks a Sales Engineer to be the technical voice in its largest enterprise deals. You will map Nadia into customer systems, define feasible scopes, and lead discussions with customers and engineering.

You will decide when to push back and when to propose sequenced solutions, balancing ambition with delivery constraints. You will build tailored demos, prototype quickly, and own security reviews, timelines, and hand-offs to delivery teams.

Qualifications

• 3+ years in sales engineering, solutions architecture or a customer-facing engineering role at a B2B SaaS company selling to large enterprises.
• Hands-on fluency with enterprise integration patterns: REST and SOAP APIs, SFTP and batch file feeds, webhooks, SSO (SAML/OIDC), SCIM provisioning.
• Comfort with enterprise security and compliance conversations: SOC 2, data retention, encryption and BYOK, single- vs. multi-tenant, cloud networking such as private connectivity.
• Experience scoping work that other engineers delivered, and owning whether the scope was right.
• Clear writing. You can turn a 2-hour discovery call into a one-page architecture and a crisp list of open questions.
• Judgment under pressure: you stay calm and honest when a customer is demanding and a deal is on the line.
• AI fluency. You use AI tools every day, and you can explain how LLM products are prompted, grounded and evaluated, and where they fail.
• A builder's instinct. You know how to use AI tools and coding agents to put together a tailored demo or lightweight prototype yourself, with scripting (Python or JavaScript), APIs or product configuration.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical discovery with enterprise buyers, HR tech owners, IT and InfoSec.
• Explain Nadia's architecture and how standard enterprise plumbing maps to the customer's environment.
• Map the customer's architecture, sort requirements into standard connectors vs. configuration vs. custom work, and write the technical scope for the SOW.
• Set realistic timelines with Engineering and route work to the right team: core engineering, forward-deployed engineering, or solutions engineering.
• Run security reviews and questionnaires, and handle CISO and IT conversations with clear, accurate answers.
• Push back and shape customer requirements into feasible deliverables within timelines.
• Build reusable assets—reference architectures, security answers, scoping templates—for faster future deals.
• Use AI and AI First principles to build tailored demos and prototypes that show Nadia in the customer's data and systems.
• You own mapping client architectures, technical specs for customer integrations, flagging and defining implementation risk for new integrations.

Skills

Sales engineering

Solutions architecture

Customer-facing

Enterprise integration patterns

AI fluency

Technical storytelling

Judgment under pressure

Tools

REST APIs

SOAP APIs

SFTP

Webhooks

SAML/OIDC

SCIM provisioning

Job description

Valence is the AI company behind Nadia, a personalized coach for everyone, built to advance teamwork and talent strategy at enterprise scale. Nadia embeds personalized, proactive development directly into the flow of daily work to help individuals build new skills and behaviors. At the organization level, Nadia is a tool for HR leaders to improve the reach and impact of their talent programs, driving measurable improvements for learning, culture, and performance globally. Since being released in early 2023, Nadia has logged more than two million coaching conversations in 100+ languages. Today, Nadia is deployed at scale across the Fortune 500, across the globe, including Nestlé, Coca-Cola, IBM, Dell, The Home Depot, CVS Health, Delta Air Lines, Kaiser Permanente, Vanguard, and more. Valence is a Series B company backed by Bessemer Venture Partners and Insight Partners, with offices in New York, Toronto, London, and San Francisco.

Learn more about our work with Microsoft: Valence Brings AI Coaching More Deeply Into the Flow of Work with Microsoft 365

At Valence, our team is focused on problems that actually decide whether AI changes how organizations operate: the ones with no playbook, no obvious answers, and no guarantee of success. If you want to be part of the small group that defines how AI transforms the future at a global scale, this is your chance.

And this isn't for everyone. We're not looking for people who want predictability or incremental progress. We only want those who are restless at the edge of what's possible, who get bored when things feel "done," and who are driven to redefine what AI can mean for leaders, companies, and the world. Because at Valence, the work worth doing is the kind that redefines work itself.

The role

As a Sales Engineer at Valence, you will be the technical voice in our largest deals. You join calls from first meeting through signature, map how Nadia fits into a customer's systems, separate what we already do from what would be custom, and write the scope that delivery teams build from. You know how to tee up the right next technical discussions both externally with customers and internally with engineering. You know when to say "yes," when to say "yes, sequenced," when to push back, and when to find the simpler thing the customer actually needs.

What you'll do

• Lead technical discovery with enterprise buyers, HR tech owners, IT and InfoSec.
• Explain Nadia's architecture and how standard enterprise plumbing — SSO, SCIM, HRIS sync, Teams deployment, data residency, encryption keys — maps to the customer's environment.
• Map the customer's architecture, sort requirements into standard connectors vs. configuration vs. custom work, and write the technical scope for the SOW.
• Set realistic timelines with Engineering and route work to the right team: core engineering, forward-deployed engineering, or solutions engineering.
• Run security reviews and questionnaires, and handle CISO and IT conversations with clear, accurate answers.
• Push back well. Be able to take an unconstrained view with clients, pushing a vision, while implicitly understanding the actual constraints that we have in terms of what we can deliver and on what timeline. Sometimes this takes the form of deflecting a client's "We must have X" requirement into something we can actually do.
• Build the reusable assets — reference architectures, security answers, scoping templates — that make the next deal faster.
• Use AI and AI First principles to build tailored demos and quick prototypes that show a customer how Nadia works with their frameworks, data and systems.
• You own mapping client architectures, technical specs for customer integrations, flagging and defining implementation risk for systems we haven't integrated with before, hand-offs to other engineering and FDE teams to deliver.

What you bring

• 3+ years in sales engineering, solutions architecture or a customer-facing engineering role at a B2B SaaS company selling to large enterprises.
• Hands-on fluency with enterprise integration patterns: REST and SOAP APIs, SFTP and batch file feeds, webhooks, SSO (SAML/OIDC), SCIM provisioning.
• Comfort with enterprise security and compliance conversations: SOC 2, data retention, encryption and BYOK, single- vs. multi-tenant, cloud networking such as private connectivity.
• Experience scoping work that other engineers delivered, and owning whether the scope was right.
• Clear writing. You can turn a 2-hour discovery call into a one-page architecture and a crisp list of open questions.
• Judgment under pressure: you stay calm and honest when a customer is demanding and a deal is on the line.
• AI fluency. You use AI tools every day, and you can explain how LLM products are prompted, grounded and evaluated, and where they fail.
• A builder's instinct. You know how to use AI tools and coding agents to put together a tailored demo or lightweight prototype yourself, with scripting (Python or JavaScript), APIs or product configuration.

Nice to have

• Experience with HRIS and talent systems, especially Workday, or with Microsoft Teams and the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
• Experience helping customers evaluate AI quality, such as building eval sets or success criteria.
• Experience as an early or first SE at a growth-stage company.

What You'll Get

• Team Leadership & Scope: Full people leadership of Valence's enterprise deployment organization for your region, direct influence over how Valence's biggest launches are run, and real influence over the best practices Enablement builds into the playbook.
• AI-First Deployment Leadership: Work directly with cutting-edge AI models in production at enterprise scale, and build deep expertise in enterprise AI deployment across some of the world's largest organizations.

Competitive Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive salary including base + performance bonus
• Comprehensive health coverage (medical, dental, vision) from day one
• Generous PTO, company-wide R&R shutdowns, and paid parental leave
• Retirement plan support (401k / pensions)

• Meaningful Equity: Ownership in a venture-backed company at a growth inflection point, with top-up grants tied to performance.
• Top-Performing Culture: A team built for top talent: high intensity to win, growth without limits, and a culture that solves hard problems and celebrates big wins together.

Location and Work Environment

We have two seats open for this role: one based in New York, NY and one based in London, UK, each working a minimum of 3 days a week in office. We will consider remote candidates elsewhere in the relevant region for the right background. Candidates must be comfortable working with colleagues across different time zones and hold valid work authorization for their country of hire. Expect regular travel to customer sites for on-site launches and executive business reviews.