Sales Engineer

Azul•Chicago, TX

2d•Remote

About The Position

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.

Requirements

5+ years in a Sales Engineering / pre-sales role supporting enterprise software, ideally in the Java, middleware, performance, or infrastructure space.
3+ years of hands-on Java development or testing experience with a demonstrable command of Java architecture.
Proven track record of hands-on pilots and POCs and of performance-related engagements where you measured and demonstrated technical results in a customer environment.
Experience selling into large enterprises — complex, multi-stakeholder, mission-critical production environments.
Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or a related IT discipline; a master’s or higher in an IT or business discipline is a plus.
Working knowledge of cloud and container technologies (e.g., AWS, Docker/Kubernetes).
Solid knowledge of sales process and CRM (MEDDICC and Salesforce preferred).
Willing and able to travel up to 30%.
Fluent in your territory’s primary language, with strong professional English.
Strong oral and written communication, effective one-on-one and in front of large groups.
Proven critical-thinking and problem-solving skills; able to solve complex technical challenges with minimal supervision.
Highly organized, detail-oriented, with excellent time management.
Highly professional and ethical.
Thrives in a fast-paced environment and can multitask across client challenges, meetings, and team needs, occasionally outside normal business hours.
Collaborates across disciplines, with the EQ to understand multiple perspectives toward a common goal.
A proven winning record.

Nice To Haves

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.
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.
Confident on the command line and in customer environments: installing, configuring, and troubleshooting runtimes; able to build and run a POC independently.
Solid understanding of Java-based applications and frameworks that run on or alongside Azul products (e.g., Cassandra, Kafka, Solr, Spring).
Working knowledge of cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and container/orchestration technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
Demonstrate SME-level depth and breadth across the entire Azul product suite, and continuously grow technical acumen through enablement, hands-on experimentation, and self-study.

Responsibilities

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.