Director of Solutions Engineering

• The Director, Solutions Engineering is a player-coach leadership role responsible for winning the technical evaluation in every deal across our Central and West regions
• You will lead a team of Solutions Engineers directly, partnering with regional sales leadership to turn open source adoption of Istio, kgateway, agent gateway and kagent into enterprise customers
• You will manage and develop the team, build the repeatable processes that make them consistent, and stay hands-on enough to lead architecture sessions and POCs on our most complex opportunities yourself
• Our buyers are platform engineering, security and architecture teams at some of the largest companies in the world, and our deals are won on technical credibility
• Lead and develop a team of Solutions Engineers across the Central and West regions, setting a high technical bar and coaching on discovery, demos, POC strategy, and executive communication
• Act as technical executive sponsor on the region’s largest and most complex opportunities, leading architecture sessions, design reviews, and objection handling yourself when the deal requires it
• Own the technical win in region: decide which deals to go deep on and which to qualify out, and set clear POC success criteria with customers before work begins
• Partner with regional sales leadership on account strategy, SE coverage, deal reviews, and forecast accuracy
• Build repeatable assets such as discovery frameworks, reference architectures, demo environments, and POC playbooks
• Position Solo against open source DIY, hyperscaler offerings, and other agnetic infrastructure, API gateway, and service mesh vendors in competitive evaluations
• Act as the voice of the field, bringing structured customer and competitive feedback to the product management, engineering, and marketing teams
• Represent Solo in the community through customer workshops, meetups, industry events, and technical content creation

• Remote first:
  We are a globally distributed remote workforce
• New employees receive a laptop, as well as a one-time stipend to support setting up their work from home space
• All employees receive a monthly allowance to help cover phone and internet expenses
• Global benefit plans include fitness and wellness reimbursements
• Employees have access to pre-tax savings options for retirement
• Employees are offered stock options to share in Solo’s success

A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Located in the Central or West US, with willingness to travel to customers and events in region

Working knowledge of AI/LLM workloads or agent infrastructure (model gateways, MCP/A2A, agent access governance) is a plus

Experience with Gateway API, Cilium/eBPF, or another API gateway or service mesh product is a plus

Deep, hands-on expertise in cloud-native technologies, including Kubernetes, agentic infrastructure, service mesh (such as Istio), and API gateways (such as Envoy), along with L4/L7 networking, mTLS, and zero-trust security

Fluency in a formal sales methodology (MEDDPICC, Command of the Message, or similar) and the ability to coach a team to use it Proven record of hiring and developing SEs and measurably improving technical win rate or POC conversion

Background at a CNCF-ecosystem or open-core infrastructure company, or experience in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, telco), is a plus8+ years of experience in technical pre-sales (Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Solutions Architect, or Field Engineer) for infrastructure software, including 3+ years directly managing SEsExperience in an open source or open-core sales motion, converting community users into enterprise customers

Experience selling to enterprise platform engineering, infrastructure, and security teams on complex, multi-stakeholder deals

Strong communication and presentation skills, with the ability to engage both principal engineers and executive buyers