Director, Presales Engineering

About the Role

The Director, Presales Engineering Excellence and Innovation will lead a high impact global function at the intersection of Sales Engineering, technical escalation management, field productivity, and product advocacy. This leader will step into a role that supports complex presales motions, advanced proof of concept execution, field escalation triage, AI‑driven workflow transformation, and strategic cross‑functional coordination across Sales, Product, Engineering, Enablement, Support, Security, Legal, and IT.

The mandate is not only to maintain current operational continuity, but to modernize how Presales Engineering scales expertise, resolves ambiguity, governs technical access, and uses AI safely to improve customer outcomes. The ideal candidate is a technical operator, field strategist, transformation leader, and trusted escalation partner. They can move from executive level strategy to detailed operational execution, while building durable systems that reduce dependency on tribal knowledge.

• Lead the evolution of Presales Engineering escalation strategy, including routing models, intake boundaries, ownership clarity, technical decision paths, and measurable service expectations.
• Drive AI‑forward transformation across the Presales Engineering organization, including prompt libraries, AI agents, approved connector strategy, custom GPT governance, MCP‑based workflows, knowledge retrieval systems, and field automation patterns.
• Own or coordinate complex technical escalation paths for high‑value opportunities, production evaluations, proof‑of‑concept blockers, product readiness gaps, access issues, and field‑facing technical ambiguity.
• Partner with Sales Engineering leadership to define and operationalize the future PSE model, including what the team owns, guides, declines, automates, or routes.
• Build scalable systems for technical knowledge capture, including reusable playbooks, enablement assets, intake forms, escalation runbooks, product signal loops, owner registries, and review cadences.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to convert recurring field issues into structured advocacy, including affected deals, ARR impact, technical gaps, workarounds, owning PMs, and requested outcomes.
• Stabilize and improve support coverage for emerging product areas such as Data Security, Insider Threat Management, AI Security, and other fast‑moving Proofpoint portfolios.
• Lead access governance coordination for Presales Engineering, including least‑privilege patterns, Cyber Ark and SailPoint workflows, lab and demo infrastructure access, queue ownership, approval paths, and exception handling.
• Coordinate globally across AMER, EMEA, and APJ stakeholders to ensure presales support coverage, distribution list ownership, onboarding readiness, and escalation visibility.
• Mentor senior technical contributors and team leads, helping them scale judgment, documentation quality, customer impact, and cross‑functional influence.
• Translate experimental AI tooling into governed, repeatable operating models that are secure, measurable, supportable, and aligned to Proofpoint’s field and customer priorities.

• 10 or more years of experience in Presales Engineering, Sales Engineering, Technical Consulting, Escalation Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Product Specialist, or related customer‑facing technical roles.
• 5 or more years leading technical teams, transformation programs, field enablement efforts, or cross‑functional technical initiatives in enterprise software or cybersecurity.
• Strong understanding of enterprise cybersecurity sales motions, including technical discovery, proof‑of‑concept execution, production evaluations, customer security architecture, objection handling, and executive‑level technical storytelling.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex escalations involving Sales, Product, Engineering, Support, IT, Security, Legal, and executive stakeholders.
• Practical fluency with AI‑enabled workflows, LLM‑based tooling, knowledge retrieval, prompt engineering, agentic systems, governance models, and safe enterprise adoption patterns.
• Experience building operating models, intake systems,…