Senior Technical Sales Engineer

VoltForce; San Leandro (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

VoltForce is seeking a Senior Technical Sales Engineer for its confidential client in San Leandro, CA. The role blends engineering credibility with commercial leadership to drive adoption of advanced materials-inspection technology.

You will manage opportunities end-to-end, run discovery with customers, present technical value, develop deployment plans, and lead negotiations across industrial, research, and operational segments. Travel occasionally.

Qualifications

• Experience selling technical products, equipment, software-enabled hardware, or engineering services.
• Ability to engage both technical users and commercial decision-makers.
• A practical understanding of consultative sales: discovery, qualification, value articulation, proposal development, and closing.
• Ability to grasp technical concepts quickly and explain them without unnecessary jargon.
• Strong written communication, particularly for proposals and customer follow-up.
• Self-directed, organized, and comfortable owning a deal cycle end to end.
• Willingness to travel occasionally for important customer meetings, demonstrations, or deployments.

Responsibilities

• Build and manage a pipeline for commercial deployments.
• Identify, qualify, and close opportunities across relevant industrial, research, and operational customer segments.
• Run discovery conversations that uncover technical requirements, buying context, timeline, and decision-makers.
• Present the company's products and capabilities in a concise, customer-relevant way.
• Develop proposals, quotes, scopes of work, and deployment plans with internal technical teams.
• Translate customer needs into clear technical requirements and ensure handoffs are accurate.
• Lead product demonstrations, pilot discussions, and commercial negotiations.
• Maintain disciplined opportunity notes, forecasts, and next steps in the CRM.
• Bring market feedback into product, engineering, and leadership conversations.
• Represent the company professionally at customer meetings, industry events, and partner conversations.

Skills

Experience selling technical products

Engaging technical users and decision‑

Consultative selling

Proposal development

Closing deals

Strong written communication

Travel willingness

Job description

Confidential client. Search led by VoltForce.

Location: San Leandro, CA (on-site)

Job Type: Full-time

About The Company

VoltForce is working with an early-stage materials-inspection company on the search for a Senior Technical Sales Engineer. Our client helps manufacturers make better, safer, and more reliable micro- and nano-scale materials, the building blocks of critical sectors like energy storage, semiconductors, aerospace, and power systems. As demand surges and production grows more complex and faster, small undetected variations during manufacturing lead to waste, lower performance, higher cost, and safety risk, leaving manufacturers with little visibility into the quality of what they produce.

The company's platform changes that. It non-destructively probes materials during production, pairing a novel sensing approach with physics-informed machine learning to capture real-time signals that conventional measurement techniques cannot access. Those signals give manufacturers rare visibility into how materials behave as they are made.

The company turns that hidden data into actionable intelligence, helping manufacturers reduce variability and increase yield and performance. The platform can run as a standalone tool or integrate directly into production lines, and it is already in early deployment with leading global manufacturers.

Role Overview

Our client is hiring a commercially minded Senior Technical Sales Engineer to grow adoption of its products. This is one of the most consequential hires the company will make: in a deeply technical business, the sales function is where engineering credibility becomes revenue. The person in this role owns that translation, turning technical capability into clear customer value and moving quickly from first conversation to a well-scoped sale.

You will work with prospective customers to understand their use case, explain the company's technology in practical terms, shape the right deployment solution, and carry opportunities through to close. You will be especially effective with organizations that need a tailored, credible path to evaluating or deploying new technology without a long enterprise sales cycle. Because customers buy on technical confidence, the quality of these conversations directly determines how fast the company grows.

What You'll Do

• Build and manage a pipeline for commercial deployments.
• Identify, qualify, and close opportunities across relevant industrial, research, and operational customer segments.
• Run discovery conversations that uncover technical requirements, buying context, timeline, and decision-makers.
• Present the company's products and capabilities in a concise, customer-relevant way.
• Develop proposals, quotes, scopes of work, and deployment plans with internal technical teams.
• Translate customer needs into clear technical requirements and ensure handoffs are accurate.
• Lead product demonstrations, pilot discussions, and commercial negotiations.
• Maintain disciplined opportunity notes, forecasts, and next steps in the CRM.
• Bring market feedback into product, engineering, and leadership conversations.
• Represent the company professionally at customer meetings, industry events, and partner conversations.

What We're Looking For

• Experience selling technical products, equipment, software-enabled hardware, or engineering services.
• Comfort engaging both technical users and commercial decision-makers.
• A practical understanding of consultative sales: discovery, qualification, value articulation, proposal development, and closing.
• Ability to grasp technical concepts quickly and explain them without unnecessary jargon.
• Strong written communication, particularly for proposals and customer follow-up.
• Self-directed, organized, and comfortable owning a deal cycle end to end.
• Sound judgment around scope, feasibility, pricing, and customer expectations.
• Willingness to travel occasionally for important customer meetings, demonstrations, or deployments.

Especially Valuable

• Background in optical systems, sensors, scientific instrumentation, industrial technology, robotics, hardware, or related fields.
• Experience selling benchtop instruments, pilot projects, proof-of-concept engagements, or custom deployments.
• Existing relationships in the company's target markets.
• Experience working in an early-stage company or small technical team.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first months, you will have built a qualified pipeline, developed a crisp understanding of the company's ideal customer and sales motion, and helped close initial benchtop and one-off deployment opportunities. Over time, you will create a repeatable commercial playbook that turns technical interest into well-scoped revenue, the foundation the rest of the company's commercial growth is built on.