Senior Sales Engineer (Pre-Sales)

Remote; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 100,000 - 145,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Hybrid work environment

Equity compensation

Retirement savings plan

25 holiday days of PTO per year

Flexible work hours

Career Enhancement Funds

Employee Referral Bonus

Job summary

ZeroTier seeks a Senior Sales Engineer to be the technical counterpart to Account Executives, owning discovery, solution architecture, demos, and value engagements worldwide. You’ll present to engineers, CISOs, and procurement, and collaborate with Customer Success post-sale.

This hybrid role is based in Utrecht, Netherlands, with remote work and travel as needed. You’ll build POVs, run demos, answer security questionnaires, and translate complex concepts into business value while shaping

Qualifications

• 5+ years “customer-facing” in a pre-sales role.
• Excellent discovery skills: ask questions to uncover problems and qualify fit.
• Executive presence and range: connect technical details to business value.
• POV/pilot management: define success criteria and action plans.
• Excellent written communication: architecture docs and RFP responses.
• Fluent professional English with global audience.
• Builder's mindset for a ~30+-person company.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical win across the deal cycle: discovery, qualification, demo, POV design and execution, technical close.
• Run structured POVs with clear success criteria, mutual action plans, timelines, and exit decisions.
• Deliver demos and whiteboard sessions to audiences from hands-on engineers to CISOs and procurement executives.
• Win competitive deals by articulating strengths/weaknesses vs competitors and being honest about gaps.
• Answer RFPs/RFIs and security questionnaires translating standards into concrete architecture answers.
• Architect across hosting options: Central, self-hosted controllers, flow rules, SSO/OIDC, and quantum modes.
• Bridge to Engineering to reproduce issues, capture evidence, elevate defects and gaps.
• Build demo environments, reference architectures, and POV runbooks to accelerate GTM.
• Feed field insights back into product with win/loss data and deployment patterns.

Skills

customer-facing

pre-sales

discovery skills

demos

POV/pilot management

written communication

English fluency

networking fundamentals

Linux

scripting (Python)

Tools

Wireshark

tcpdump

Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP)

SAML/OIDC

Job description

Opening

Senior Sales Engineer is a pre-sales, customer-facing role working closely with the Sales team. You'll spend your days in discovery calls, demos, POVs, and deal strategy — not in a NOC or writing production code, but you will also participate in post-sales technical escalation support on occasion, as well as collaborate with customer success and customer onboarding requests. This is not a software or network architect role.” Pre-sales Engineering experience is required.

About ZeroTier

ZeroTier leads the world in next-generation connectivity and cybersecurity. Our platform provides highly secure, peer-to-peer virtual networks relied upon by millions of users and businesses - from individual users and startups to mid-scale enterprises and Fortune 500 companies. We’re backed by awesome investors including Battery Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, and Anorak Ventures.

The Role

You are the technical counterpart to our Account Executives and the trusted advisor to buyers across Europe, Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world — from a founder connecting a fleet of Raspberry Pis, to an industrial OT team bridging PLCs across plants, to a defense integrator architecting an air-gapped, post-quantum secure sovereign network. You own the technical win: discovery, solution architecture, demos, and proof-of-value engagements end-to-end, then hand off cleanly to Customer Success.

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical win across the deal cycle: discovery and qualification with AEs, demo, POV design and execution, technical close.

• Run structured POVs with clear success criteria, mutual action plans, timelines, and exit decisions — for deployments from ten nodes to tens of thousands.

• Deliver demos and whiteboard sessions that land with audiences from hands-on network engineers to CISOs and procurement executives.

• Win competitive deals — articulating where ZeroTier beats WireGuard-based stacks and legacy VPN/SD-WAN vendors, and being honest about where it doesn't.

• Answer RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires, translating NIST, European, and NATO, and post-quantum readiness requirements into concrete architecture answers.

• Architect across our full surface area: hosted Central, self-hosted controllers, flow rules, bridging, multipath, SSO/OIDC, and ZeroTier Quantum's SaaS, sovereign, and air-gapped modes.

• Bridge to Engineering when deals need it — reproduce issues, capture evidence, elevate defects and feature gaps.

• Build the SE machine: demo environments, reference architectures, battle cards, and POV runbooks that make the whole go-to-market team faster.

• Feed the field's voice into the product: structured win/loss insights, deployment patterns, roadmap input.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years “customer-facing” in a pre-sales role — Sales Engineer, Solutions Engineer, or Solutions Architect attached to a sales team and a quota. You can point to deals you helped win and explain your role in winning them.

• Excellent discovery skills: you ask the second and third question, uncover the real problem, and disqualify gracefully when there isn't a fit.

• Executive presence and range — equally credible whiteboarding Layer 2 internals with a network architect and presenting risk and ROI to a board-level audience.

• POV/pilot management as a discipline: success criteria, mutual action plans, crisp status communication, on-time execution in parallel.

• Excellent written communication — architecture docs, follow-up summaries, and RFP responses that are clear, polished, and technically precise.

• Fluent professional English — with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly with customers across Europe and other parts of the world. Additional languages are a plus.

• A builder's mindset for a ~30+-person company: low ego, high ownership, comfortable with ambiguity.

The technical bar (you'll be tested on this, conversationally):

• Strong networking fundamentals: Layer 2 vs. Layer 3 behavior, routing, NAT and NAT traversal, firewalls, DNS, and overlay/underlay separation.

• Comfort at the packet level — Wireshark/tcpdump is a working tool, not a party trick.

• Solid Linux and real cloud experience (AWS/Azure/GCP): VPCs, routing, security groups, hybrid connectivity.

• Hands-on familiarity with at least two of: SD-WAN, ZTNA, VPN technologies (WireGuard, IPsec, OpenVPN), container networking, or embedded/IoT connectivity.

• Working knowledge of SSO/identity (OIDC, SAML, Entra ID/Okta) as it intersects with network access.

• Scripting fluency (Python, Bash) — enough to automate a demo environment and exercise a REST API. ( Rust exp is nice but not critical)

• The ability to translate all of the above into plain-language business value for a non-cryptographer audience.

Nice to have

• Selling into defense, government, or regulated sectors (national Ministries of Defence, NATO, EU institutions, GovCloud, sovereign infrastructure).

• Familiarity with European cybersecurity and regulatory frameworks, such as NIS2, DORA, the EU Cyber Resilience Act, and European digital sovereignty requirements.

• Background in OT/industrial environments (Modbus, IEC-61850, SCADA).

• Prior work at an overlay networking, mesh VPN, ZTNA, or SD-WAN vendor.

• Experience as a first or early SE hire — building the function, not just running plays.

• A working grasp of modern cryptography and the quantum threat model — why "harvest now, decrypt later" makes PQC a today problem — and familiarity with the NIST PQC standards (FIPS 203/204/205), hybrid schemes, and the CNSA 2.0 compliance landscape. Most importantly: the ability to translate this into plain-language business value without overselling.

• Familiarity with the NIST post-quantum standards (FIPS 203 / ML-KEM, FIPS 204 / ML-DSA, FIPS 205 / SLH-DSA), hybrid classical + PQC schemes, and crypto-agility as an architectural principle.

• Awareness of the compliance landscape driving adoption: CNSA 2.0, European and NATO cryptographic requirements, and emerging PQC mandates across government and regulated industries.

How we work

You'll report to the Director of Pre-Sales Engineering & Customer Success and partner daily with Sales, Engineering, and Customer Success. Remote‑first, with occasional travel for key customer engagements, POV kickoffs, and industry events. We move quickly, write things down, and hold a high bar for what we put in front of customers.

Important: This is a hybrid role based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, with three days per week in our office at Utrecht Central Station and two days working from home.

Benefits

• Competitive salary

• Hybrid work environment: we work 3 days at our office at Utrecht Central Station and 2 days from home

• Equity compensation package

• Retirement savings plan with employer contribution

• 25 holiday days of PTO per year

• Flexible work hours (subject to management approval)

• Career Enhancement Funds as well as a generous Employee Referral Bonus

More About ZeroTier

Founded in 2013 by Adam Ierymenko, ZeroTier's mission is to make peer-to-peer networking with strong encryption so simple, secure, and intuitive that it becomes the default for the internet. To do this, ZeroTier simplifies complex networking across physical boundaries, unifying cloud and edge environments. Our network virtualization platform offers enterprise-grade software-defined networking for every device, service, and application, whether at the edge or in the cloud. It's powerful enough for large businesses and defense applications, yet easy for individuals to use for tasks like gaming or remote access. Our team is the best of the best, working diligently to solve the hard technical challenges underlying high-performance decentralized networking. We help our customers run networks free of handcuffs and endless minutiae. Come join us! To find out more, please check us out at: www.zerotier.com

PLEASE NOTE: Individuals seeking employment at ZeroTier are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, or sexual orientation.