Sales Engineer

About the Role

The Azul Sales Engineer is a hands‑on, deeply technical pre‑sales leader responsible for delivering the technical win across opportunities within their territory. Azul sells to the most demanding Java estates in the world—enterprises running mission‑critical, high‑throughput, latency‑sensitive applications on the JVM—so this role demands genuine engineering depth, not just presentation polish.

A Sales Engineer earns credibility with engineers, architects, and executives alike by getting hands on
: running technical evaluations in the customer’s own environment, tuning the JVM, interpreting GC and performance data, and translating measurable technical outcomes into clear business value. Beyond individual deals, the Sales Engineer uses their experience to mentor and uplevel the broader SE team.

• Own the technical win. Drive pre‑sales engagements end to end—discovery of the prospect’s business and technical challenges, mapping Azul portfolio capabilities to those challenges, and validating the solution through demonstration and hands‑on proof.
• Lead hands‑on pilots. Design, scope, and personally execute product pilots and proofs‑of‑concept inside the customer’s existing environment: installing and configuring the JVM, running representative workloads, and capturing empirical results the customer trusts.
• Prove performance. Plan and run performance‑focused engagements: establish benchmarks and success criteria, measure latency, throughput, GC pause behavior and resource efficiency, analyze GC and JIT logs, tune JVM settings, and quantify the improvement Azul delivers against the incumbent.
• Win at enterprise scale. Navigate complex, multi‑stakeholder enterprise engagements (large production estates, strict SLAs, security and compliance review, and long procurement cycles) coordinating technical validation across many teams and environments.
• Present at every altitude. Deliver presentations and demos across all technical levels, from CxOs to hands‑on developers, to “make the complex simple” and communicate Azul’s value to each audience.
• Respond to technical requirements. Understand and respond to solicited and unsolicited proposals (RFI/RFP) by aligning Azul capabilities against detailed technical and business requirements.
• Orchestrate the extended team. Engage Product Management, Engineering, and the CTO office as needed to remove technical blockers and secure the win.
• Partner on territory strategy. Work alongside your Account Executive(s) on territory planning: pipeline generation, growing existing accounts, and enabling partners.
• Grow and retain customers. Nurture existing clients to promote customer success and to create new upsell and cross‑sell opportunities.
• Evangelize. Present at conferences, workshops, and roadshows to raise awareness of the Azul portfolio and build funnel.
• Mentor the team. Provide expert assistance to other SEs on pilot planning and execution, run training sessions, and serve as a primary mentor to onboarding SEs.
• Be a trusted advisor. Advise your manager on product, territory, and team matters.

These are the core technical strengths that define a successful Sales Engineer at Azul:

• Java & the JVM. Deep, hands‑on knowledge of Java internals and the JVM: class loading, JIT compilation, memory model, and garbage collection. Able to read and reason about GC logs and runtime behavior, not just describe them.
• Performance engineering. Practical experience benchmarking, profiling, and tuning JVM‑based applications for latency, throughput, and scale; comfortable diagnosing GC pauses, warm‑up, jitter, and resource‑efficiency issues in production‑like conditions.
• Hands‑on aptitude. Confident on the command line and in customer environments: installing, configuring, and troubleshooting runtimes; able to build and run a POC independently.
• Enterprise application stacks. Solid understanding of Java‑based applications and frameworks that run on or alongside Azul products (e.g., Cassandra, Kafka, Solr, Spring).
• Cloud & containers. Working knowledge of cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and container/orchestration technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Po…