Senior Sales Engineer (Pre-Sales)

Job description

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 ZeroTier** ZeroTier 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. **The Role** 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. ### What You’ll Do - **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 ZeroTier beats Tailscale, WireGuard-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 ZeroTier Quantum's SaaS, sovereign, and air-gapped modes. - **Bridge to Engineering** when deals need it — reproduce issues, capture evidence, escalate 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. ### What We’re Looking For **Pre-sales craft comes first. We can teach ZeroTier 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 (WireGuard, IPsec, OpenVPN), container networking, or embedded/IoT connectivity. - Working knowledge of SSO/identity (OIDC, SAML, Entra ID/Okta) as it intersects with network access. - Scripting fluency (Python, Bash) — enough to automate a demo environment and exercise a REST API. - The ability to translate all of the above into plain-language business value for a non-cryptographer audiences ### Nice to have - Selling into defense, government, or regulated sectors (DOD, GovCloud, sovereign infrastructure). - Background in OT/industrial environments (Modbus, IEC-61850, SCADA). - Prior work at an overlay networking, mesh VPN, ZTNA, or SD-WAN vendor. - Experience as a first or early SE hire — building the function, not just running plays. - A working grasp of modern cryptography and the quantum threat model — why "harvest now, decrypt later" makes PQC a today problem — and familiarity with the NIST PQC standards (FIPS 203/204/205), hybrid schemes, and the CNSA 2.0 compliance landscape. Most importantly: the ability to translate this into plain-language business value without overselling. - Familiarity with the NIST post-quantum standards (FIPS 203 / ML-KEM, FIPS 204 / ML-DSA, FIPS 205 / SLH-DSA), hybrid classical + PQC schemes, and crypto-agility as an architectural principle. - Awareness of the compliance landscape driving adoption: CNSA 2.0 timelines, FIPS 140-3 validation, and PQC mandates emerging across government and regulated industries. ### How we work You'll report to the Director of Pre-Sales Engineering & Customer Success and partner daily with Sales, Engineering, and Customer Success. Remote-first with occasional travel for key customer engagements, POV kickoffs, and industry events. We move quickly, write things down, and hold a high bar for what we put in front of customers. ### Benefits - Competitive salary **+ variable compensation tied to team success** and available equity - Hybrid office / remote work environment - Generous employer-paid health insurance, including preventative dental - 401K with employer matching - Flexible PTO and flexible work hours - Career enhancement funds