Sales Engineer

Kion•Columbia, MD

9h•$150,000 - $160,000•Remote

About The Position

Kion is revolutionizing CloudOps and FinOps with a unified approach to multicloud, multi-org, and multi-account visibility and controls. This role is customer-facing, acting as the engine of Kion's pre-sales motion. The Solutions Engineer guides prospects through the evaluation process, conducts technical discovery, runs custom demos, and manages the overall narrative arc to convert prospects into fans. The role emphasizes building trust and ensuring prospects feel heard and supported throughout the evaluation. The day-to-day involves significant context switching between internal and external tasks, discovery and demo, and strategic and tactical work. Key activities include leading discovery calls, running tailored product demonstrations, partnering with the Solutions team, building business cases, translating technical capabilities into understandable language, anticipating objections, and developing reusable collateral. The role also involves translating customer feedback to Product and Engineering teams.

Requirements

3 to 6 years in a customer-facing technical role (Solutions Engineering, Sales Engineering, or Solutions Architecture with a strong pre-sales lean).
Demonstrated ability to lead a prospect through a technical evaluation from first call to decision.
Working knowledge of at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
Familiarity with the cloud governance space (IAM, policies, compliance frameworks, FinOps concepts, multi-account environments).
Comfort with authentication frameworks (SAML, LDAP, Active Directory, RBAC) at a conversational and demo level.
Strong presentation and storytelling skills.
Ability to remain calm under pressure and adjust approach as needed.
Comfortable using AI as a working tool for drafting demos, prepping for calls, and summarizing environments.
Humility and honesty, especially when lacking an immediate answer.
Up to 15 to 20% travel for prospect meetings and industry events.

Nice To Haves

Experience selling or evaluating into enterprises and understanding their buying processes.
Experience working with complementary skill sets and understanding effective partnerships.
Ability to differentiate between a prospect who is truly stuck and one who is stalling, and knowing how to respond.
Proactively building things (demos, scripts, tools) to figure them out.
Energized by context switching and wearing multiple hats.

Responsibilities

Lead discovery calls and technical evaluations end-to-end.
Uncover prospect needs and map them to Kion's capabilities.
Shape evaluations around customer outcomes.
Run product demonstrations tailored to different stakeholders (CFO, CISO, cloud engineer).
Partner closely with the broader Solutions team, owning the prospect relationship and narrative.
Build the business case alongside the prospect, quantifying problems and framing solutions.
Translate complex technical capabilities into language for non-technical buyers.
Anticipate and address objections to maintain momentum.
Build reusable demo flows, discovery frameworks, and prospect-facing collateral.
Translate prospect and customer feedback into product insights.