Senior Sales Engineer (Pre-Sales

Senior Sales Engineer is a pre-sales customer facing, quota-adjacent role on the Sales team. You'll spend your days in discovery calls, demos, POVs, and deal strategy — not in a NOC nor writing production code but will also participate in post sales technical escalation support on occasion as well as collaboration with customer success and customer onboarding requests.”This is not a software or network architect role.”

Pre-sales Engineering experience is required.

About Zero Tier

Zero Tier 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.

You are the technical counterpart to our Account Executives and the trusted advisor to buyers — 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, CNSA 2.0-compliant 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.

• 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 Zero Tier beats Tailscale, Wire Guard‑based stacks, and legacy VPN/SD‑WAN vendors, and being honest about where it doesn't.

• Answer RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires
  , translating FIPS, CNSA 2.0, 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 Zero Tier 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.

Pre‑sales craft comes first. We can teach Zero Tier internals; we can't teach you how to run a deal.

• 4+ 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.

• Elite 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.

• 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 (Wire Guard, IPsec, OpenVPN), container networking, or…