Senior Sales Engineer

Primer.ai; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Primer.ai in Washington, DC seeks a Senior Sales Engineer to be the technical partner to its go-to-market team, working with Account Executives, Advisors, Partners, and Marketing to shape and win government opportunities. You’ll translate mission challenges into Proofs of Concept and compelling demos.

You will lead the technical side of the sales cycle, from discovery through prototypes, aligning teams and ensuring credibility with IC stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5–7 years in sales engineering or related roles.
• Experience selling into the Intelligence Community (IC).
• Ability to articulate AI concepts to diverse stakeholders.
• Understanding of intelligence missions and analytic workflows.

Responsibilities

• Relate Primer’s capabilities to government mission outcomes.
• Represent the technical voice within account teams.
• Support ideation and implementation of solutions with product/engineering。
• Prioritize features based on customer engagement and feedback.

Skills

Sales engineering

IC domain knowledge

Analytic workflows

AI concepts

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s or advanced degree in a technical field

Tools

Docker

Elastic

Neo4j

Job description

As a Senior Sales Engineer, you’ll be the technical partner to Primer’s go-to-market team. You’ll work closely with Account Executives, Advisors, Partners, and Marketing to find, shape, and win opportunities across government. Your main job is to understand each prospect’s mission: their operational challenges, their workflows, and the outcomes they’re responsible for. Then you’ll show how Primer’s solution applies directly to that mission.

You’ll lead the technical side of the sales cycle, from early discovery through demos, prototypes, and proofs of concept. You’ll turn complex mission requirements into clear, compelling solutions that help customers see and experience Primer’s value before they buy. You can take in new technical concepts quickly and spot obstacles early, so pursuits move forward and our teams stay aligned and credible with government stakeholders.

Job responsibilities - How You Will Make an Impact

• Enable customers to see the art of the possible by relating Primer’s technical capabilities to mission outcomes.
• Represent the technical voice of the customer within your account team to develop strategies that enhance mission outcomes for our customers.
• Support the ideation and implementation of solutions and feature sets for the customers while partnering with product and engineering to develop and deliver.
• Partner with product and engineering at Primer to identify and prioritize new features and algorithmic development based on customer engagement and feedback.

Relevant Skills and Experience

• 5-7+ years in sales engineering, solutions architecture, or customer-facing technical roles, ideally selling enterprise software or AI solutions into the Intelligence Community
• Direct experience supporting IC agencies and elements, such as CIA, NSA, DIA, NGA, NRO, ODNI, or the military service intelligence components
• Strong understanding of intelligence missions and analytic workflows, including the intelligence cycle, all-source analysis, OSINT, and how analysts collect, process, exploit, and disseminate information
• Experience with how the IC buys technology: acquisition pathways such as OTAs, SBIRs, and IDIQs; contract vehicles; budget and program cycles; and moving capabilities from pilot to enterprise adoption
• Ability to tie analytic and mission outcomes to technical solutions, and to explain how AI improves analyst speed, scale, and confidence while respecting analytic tradecraft standards
• Ability to explain complex AI concepts to analysts, engineers, mission owners, and program leadership

AI and technical knowledge

• Hands-on experience with LLMs and agentic AI, including multi-agent workflows, tool use, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and evaluating agent performance and reliability
• Solid grounding in NLP, including named-entity recognition (NER), entity resolution, and clustering, especially on multilingual and unstructured intelligence data
• Experience with graph databases (e.g., Neo4j) and with building or using knowledge graphs to model entities, relationships, networks, and events
• Experience deploying into IC environments, including classified networks (JWICS, SIPRNet), IC cloud environments (C2E), on-premises, and air-gapped systems
• Experience with Docker and Elastic
• Understanding of IC security and accreditation requirements, including ICD 503, Authority to Operate (ATO) processes, FedRAMP, IL5/6, and FIPS

Preferred Qualifications:

• Active TS/SCI clearance; Full-Scope or CI Polygraph strongly preferred
• Bachelor’s or advanced degree in a technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• Prior service as an intelligence analyst, targeter, or technical officer within the IC or military intelligence