Sales Engineering Manager

Vapi•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Vapi is seeking a Sales Engineering Manager to build and lead their enterprise sales engineering function. This role is crucial as Vapi expands into the enterprise market, where technical evaluations are a key part of the sales process. The manager will be responsible for hiring, establishing POC standards, developing demo assets, and defining how the sales engineering team collaborates with Account Executives. This is a player-coach position with significant influence on Vapi's enterprise sales strategy.

Requirements

6+ years in a technical customer-facing role.
2+ years managing Sales Engineers or Solutions Architects, ideally through a period of significant team growth.
Experience hiring Sales Engineers.
Ability to write code, build working integrations, read API responses, and debug customer webhooks independently.
Experience with voice, telephony, or contact center infrastructure (e.g., SIP, Twilio, Genesys, Five9).
Comfortable interacting with both engineers and executives.
Ability to coach teams on adjusting technical detail levels appropriately.
Experience and enthusiasm for technical sales processes including discovery, architecture, POCs, and objection handling.

Nice To Haves

Experience through a stage where the team doubled.
Ability to differentiate between a polished demo and a strong engineer within an interview loop.

Responsibilities

Learn the product and build agents, integrate telephony, and participate in live enterprise deals.
Meet with Sales Engineers, Account Executives, and founders to understand current deal coverage and identify bottlenecks.
Gain deep understanding of the product architecture, including telephony, LLM orchestration, integrations, and contact center workflows.
Develop a hiring plan for the Sales Engineering team and begin recruiting candidates.
Define standards for discovery, demos, and Proof of Concept (POC) scoping to ensure consistent deal quality.
Act as a player-coach in the largest opportunities.
Manage team capacity and deal assignments.
Review POCs before deployment and coach the team on live calls.
Build a library of reusable assets, including reference architectures, integration patterns, and objection responses.
Own key metrics such as technical win rate and time to go-live, and provide data-driven feedback on product gaps to engineering.