Dir, Solutions Engineering

Solo.io, Inc.

1d

About The Position

Solo.io is reimagining infrastructure for cloud and AI, combining secure cloud connectivity with AI-ready, agentic infrastructure. Enterprises use Solo.io to connect applications, services, and AI workloads across environments.

The Director, Solutions Engineering is a player-coach leadership role responsible for winning technical evaluations across the Central and West regions. The Director leads and develops a team of Solutions Engineers, partners with regional sales leadership, and helps convert adoption of Solo’s open-source projects—including Istio, kgateway, agentgateway, and kagent—into enterprise customers. The role combines team management and process development with hands-on leadership of architecture sessions and proofs of concept for complex opportunities. Buyers include platform engineering, security, and architecture teams at large enterprises.

Solo describes its culture as collaborative, fun, and fast-paced. Teams work with customers, partners, and open-source communities to deliver technology innovation, solutions, architectural best practices, and hands-on education. Solo’s customer engagement model is designed to help customers succeed quickly and support them as their production environments grow.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of technical pre-sales experience in infrastructure software, such as Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Solutions Architect, or Field Engineer.
• At least 3 years of direct experience managing Solutions Engineers.
• Proven ability to hire and develop Solutions Engineers and measurably improve technical win rates or POC conversion.
• Deep, hands-on expertise in cloud-native technologies, including Kubernetes, agentic infrastructure, service mesh such as Istio, and API gateways such as Envoy, as well as L4/L7 networking, mTLS, and zero-trust security.
• Experience selling to enterprise platform engineering, infrastructure, and security teams in complex, multi-stakeholder deals.
• Experience with an open-source or open-core sales motion, converting community users into enterprise customers.
• Fluency in a formal sales methodology, such as MEDDPICC or Command of the Message, and ability to coach a team in its use.
• Strong communication and presentation skills, including the ability to engage principal engineers and executive buyers.
• Located in the Central or West US and willing to travel to customers and events in the region.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Gateway API, Cilium/eBPF, or another API gateway or service mesh product.
• Working knowledge of AI/LLM workloads or agent infrastructure, such as model gateways, MCP/A2A, or agent access governance.
• Background at a CNCF-ecosystem or open-core infrastructure company, or experience in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, or telecommunications.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop Solutions Engineers across the Central and West regions, setting a high technical bar and coaching on discovery, demos, POC strategy, and executive communication.
• Serve as technical executive sponsor for the region’s largest and most complex opportunities, leading architecture sessions, design reviews, and objection handling when needed.
• Own the technical win in the region, determining which deals to pursue deeply and which to qualify out, and setting clear customer POC success criteria before work begins.
• Partner with regional sales leadership on account strategy, SE coverage, deal reviews, and forecast accuracy.
• Build repeatable assets, including discovery frameworks, reference architectures, demo environments, and POC playbooks.
• Position Solo against open-source DIY approaches, hyperscaler offerings, and competing agentic infrastructure, API gateway, and service mesh vendors.
• Bring structured customer and competitive feedback to product management, engineering, and marketing teams.
• Represent Solo in the community through customer workshops, meetups, industry events, and technical content creation.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director