Senior Solution Engineer (Pre-sales)

Job description

At Apollo GraphQL, we’re on a mission to make it radically easier for engineering teams to ship fast, reliable products and services on top of the world’s data, powering everything from web to mobile to agentic experiences.. We’re looking for a Senior Solution Engineer who loves stepping into business‑critical challenges and turning them into clear, elegant architectures that customers can’t wait to build. As a Senior SE, you’ll be the technical quarterback on some of our most important opportunities: partnering with prospects and customers to design and scale their supergraph on GraphOS, and helping them prove out real impact in production. You’ll join a tight‑knit global SE team that collaborates closely with Sales, Marketing, Product, and Engineering—so the work you do doesn’t just close deals, it directly shapes Apollo’s roadmap and how we show up in the market. At its core, this role connects customer problems, Apollo’s capabilities, and value: uncovering the real problem, translating technical options into business outcomes, building technical confidence, and reducing buying risk. ## What you’ll do - **Own complex technical evaluations** for strategic new and existing accounts: lead discovery, workshops, and solution design to deeply understand customer APIs, architectures, and constraints, and turn them into clear required capabilities and technical win plans. - **Design and present multi‑system solution architectures** that show how Apollo’s supergraph, GraphOS, and tooling fit into modern cloud‑native environments —meeting customers where they are while charting a safe, future‑proof path forward. - **Lead compelling, value‑focused demos and PoCs**, translating complex technical capabilities into simple, business‑aligned stories for audiences ranging from lead developers and architects to VP/C‑suite decision makers. - **De‑risk and win complex deals** by anticipating and resolving technical blockers (security, compliance, integration, performance), building customer confidence that Apollo will work in their environment, and partnering with AEs on value‑based selling, and close strategy. - **Partner tightly with Sales, CS, Product, and Engineering**: act as a trusted advisor throughout the account lifecycle, feed structured field insight back into roadmap and positioning, and contribute reusable reference architectures, playbooks, and patterns that the broader team can use at scale. - **Elevate the team through enablement and AI‑augmented workflows**: mentor junior SEs, share best practices, and actively use AI tooling (including agentic/MCP‑based workflows) to improve discovery, architecture design, and demo/PoC execution. ## Who you are You’re an experienced, hands‑on Solutions Engineer (or architect in a similar customer‑facing role) who loves sitting at the intersection of code, architecture, and commercial impact. You’re just as comfortable whiteboarding a distributed system with staff engineers as you are explaining the “so what?” to a VP of Engineering or CIO, and you thrive when you can roll up your sleeves on a PoC, earn technical trust, and guide a customer from “evaluation” to “we can’t imagine building without this.” You see Solutions Engineering as part of the go‑to‑market engine: your purpose is not just to “be technical” but to help progress qualified opportunities toward successful outcomes—new ARR, healthy renewals, and meaningful expansions. ## Minimum requirements - **4+ years** in a pre‑sales Solutions Engineering or equivalent technical customer‑facing role (sales engineer, field engineer, customer engineer, or architect) working on complex B2B SaaS or infrastructure products. - **Deep domain expertise around APIs and integration**, with prior experience working both with teams who build APIs and with teams who consume them, integrating into existing architectures and tool stacks (CI/CD, observability, cloud, API gateways, etc.). - **Strong architecture and integration skills across modern web/cloud stacks**—comfortable discussing REST/GraphQL, microservices, identity/security, and data flows, and designing multi‑system architectures that can be implemented in real‑world environments. - **Proven track record owning complex technical evaluations end‑to‑end**, including discovery, solution design, PoC implementation guidance, objection handling, and technical win for enterprise or upper‑mid‑market accounts. - **Executive‑level communication and storytelling skills**: able to move fluidly between deep technical detail and clear business value for developers, architects, product leaders, and executives, and to act as a trusted advisor to senior stakeholders. - **Sales process and value‑based selling fluency**: comfortable with MEDDPICC, team selling with AEs/CS, and framing Apollo’s capabilities in terms of commercial impact. - **Collaborative, low‑ego teammate** who works well across Sales, Product, Engineering, and CS, mentors less‑tenured SEs, and prefers creating reusable assets over one‑off work. ## Nice to have - **Hands‑on GraphQL experience**, ideally including schema design, federation, or operating production GraphQL services—whether from a previous SE role, as an engineer, or through meaningful side projects. - Background as a **software engineer or architect**, with the ability to read code, reason about performance and scalability trade‑offs, and pair productively with customer engineering teams. - Experience selling or implementing **developer‑focused platforms** (APIs, integration platforms, data/analytics, observability, or adjacent infra) into large or regulated enterprises. - Familiarity with common **security, compliance, and networking** topics that come up in enterprise evaluations (SSO, RBAC, data residency, SOC 2, VPC/networking patterns). - Comfort in **fast‑moving, high‑growth environments**, where you help shape the playbook (including via AI/agentic tooling) rather than just follow it, and enjoy contributing to content, enablement, and broader GTM strategy. ### About Apollo Apollo helps teams build, operate, and scale the graphs that power modern applications. If you’ve streamed a show, booked a trip, or read the news online, there’s a good chance Apollo was working quietly behind the scenes. We support some of the largest and most sophisticated GraphQL platforms in the world. But we’re not here just to maintain the status quo. Apollo is redefining how software teams build and ship - bringing clarity, speed, and leverage to increasingly complex systems. Our platform gives teams a single, coherent way to connect clients, services, and now AI-powered experiences, without drowning in endpoints or bespoke integrations. Just as importantly, we’re building a company where ambitious people can do the best work of their careers. That means meaningful ownership, smart teammates, and tackling hard problems that actually matter. If you like moving fast, thinking deeply, and helping shape what comes next, you’ll feel right at home here.