Solutions Engineering Manager

Job description

Synthesia is the world’s leading AI video platform for business, used by over 90% of the Fortune 100. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in London, with offices and teams across Europe and the US. As AI continues to shape the way we live and work, Synthesia develops products to enhance visual communication and enterprise skill development, helping people work better and stay at the center of successful organizations. Following our recent Series E funding round, where we raised $200 million, our valuation stands at $4 billion. Our total funding exceeds $530 million from premier investors including Accel, NVentures (Nvidia's VC arm), Kleiner Perkins, GV, and Evantic Capital, alongside the founders and operators of Stripe, Datadog, Miro, and Webflow. We're looking for a Solutions Engineering Manager to lead and grow our presales function in Austin. Reporting to our presales VP of Solutions Engineering, this is a founding leadership role where you'll help us establish the discipline from the ground up, shaping the playbook that drives your region's success while collaborating across the business to share best practices. As a Solutions Engineering Manager, you will have full ownership of your team's success; you'll be hiring and developing Solutions Engineers, while staying hands-on in the highest-impact deals in your market. You'll set the bar for how your team runs discovery, demos, Proofs of Concept, and technical evaluations. You'll regularly partner with Sales leadership, Product, Customer Success, and Product Marketing to connect your team's work to revenue outcomes. You'll own forecasting, performance, and the overall health of your market, collaborating with presales leadership on strategy and priorities. **About the role:** **Recruitment and Development** - Hire, ramp, and develop a team of 5-10 Solutions Engineers (SEs)in your region, across experience levels, from mid-career to subject matter experts. - Run regular 1:1s, deal reviews, and career development conversations, ensuring a high quality of discovery, demos, and technical evaluations across the team. - Build a collaborative, inclusive team culture where Solutions Engineers support each other across deals, not just their own book. **Execution** - Execute and reinforce Synthesia's core presales motions (research, discovery, demos, workshops, Proofs of Concept, champion building, and handover to customer success) with consistency across your team. - Design and evolve Synthesia's demo methodology across Studio, Roleplay Sessions, and Interactive Avatars, so your team proves business value quickly regardless of use case. - Build and maintain the presales toolkit for your team with Synthesia's product and operations teams for demo environments, reusable assets, evaluation guides, and objection handling; iterating where you see gaps for your market. - Evangelize and drive consistent use of AI tools across your team, from call prep to demo delivery to turning discovery notes into follow-up documentation to improve win rate and deal size. - Partner with Enablement and senior SEs in other markets to share what's working and avoid rebuilding the same assets twice. - Own forecasting and pipeline hygiene for presales involvement in your market, and report on team performance, win rates, and Proofs of Concept throughput to presales leadership. - Partner with Sales leadership on account and territory strategy, resourcing your team against the highest-value opportunities. - Bring visibility to deal risk, timeline, and technical dependencies across your team's active opportunities, and unblock what your SEs can't unblock alone. - Route field feedback, product gaps, and competitive intelligence from your team up to Product, Product Marketing, and SE leadership. **Domain and Playbook expertise** - Design and evolve Synthesia's demo methodology across Studio, Roleplay Sessions, and Interactive Avatars. - Use your experience in expert-level discovery, demonstrations, and Proofs of Concept scoping to coach SEs at every level. - Build fluency in MEDDPICC and Command of the Message frameworks across your team through coaching on real-world application, not framework recitation. - Deliver and coach Proofs of Concept and executive readouts as a business narrative, not a feature tour, holding the room with C-level audiences yourself when the deal calls for it. **About you:** - Experience recruiting, managing, and developing Solution Engineering presales teams. - You've owned the full employee life cycle from hiring through onboarding and promotions, across tenures from early stage to specialised individual contributors. You've done this with teams you've inherited, plus those you've built from scratch. - Your path to leadership started as an IC executing straightforward opportunities against a playbook, then evolved into solving complex problems with product partners - ultimately building deep expertise in a specific business area or vertical. - Track record of improving team performance through coaching, hands-on deal support, and consistent execution of an established presales process, not through reinventing it. - Comfortable owning forecasting, pipeline hygiene, and performance reporting from a presales perspective, not mimicking the AE perspective. - Fluent in MEDDPICC and Command of the Message, with the credibility to coach both new and experienced SEs on applying them. - Clear, inclusive communicator who can flex from deep technical detail to executive-level value narratives, and can teach others to do the same. - Collaborative leadership style, comfortable partnering with Sales, Product, Customer Success, and Product Marketing leadership as peers, not just stakeholders. **Location:** This role is hybrid (2 - 3 days a week in our NYC office depending on needs), and we offer 60 days "work from anywhere" annually.