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Solo.io is reimagining infrastructure for cloud and AI, uniting secure cloud connectivity with AI-ready, agentic infrastructure. Leading enterprises worldwide trust Solo to securely connect applications, services, and AI workloads across any environment.
The Director, Solutions Engineering is a player-coach leadership role responsible for winning technical evaluations across the Central and West regions. You will lead a team of Solutions Engineers directly, partnering with regional sales leadership to convert open source adoption of Istio, kgateway, agentgateway, and kagent into enterprise customers. You will manage and develop the team, build repeatable processes, and stay hands-on enough to lead architecture sessions and POCs on the most complex opportunities. Buyers are platform engineering, security, and architecture teams at some of the largest companies in the world, and deals are won on technical credibility.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead and develop a team of Solutions Engineers across Central and West regions, setting a high technical bar and coaching on discovery, demos, POC strategy, and executive communication
- Act as technical executive sponsor on the region's largest and most complex opportunities, leading architecture sessions, design reviews, and objection handling when needed
- Own the technical win in region: decide which deals to go deep on and which to qualify out, setting clear POC success criteria with customers
- Partner with regional sales leadership on account strategy, SE coverage, deal reviews, and forecast accuracy
- Build repeatable assets such as discovery frameworks, reference architectures, demo environments, and POC playbooks
- Position Solo against open source DIY, hyperscaler offerings, and other agentic infrastructure, API gateway, and service mesh vendors in competitive evaluations
- Act as the voice of the field, bringing structured customer and competitive feedback to product management, engineering, and marketing teams
- Represent Solo in the community through customer workshops, meetups, industry events, and technical content creation
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years of experience in technical pre-sales (Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Solutions Architect, or Field Engineer) for infrastructure software, including 3+ years directly managing SEs
- Proven record of hiring and developing SEs and measurably improving technical win rate or POC conversion
- Deep, hands-on expertise in cloud-native technologies, including Kubernetes, agentic infrastructure, service mesh (such as Istio), and API gateways (such as Envoy), along with L4/L7 networking, mTLS, and zero-trust security
- Experience selling to enterprise platform engineering, infrastructure, and security teams on complex, multi-stakeholder deals
- Experience in an open source or open-core sales motion, converting community users into enterprise customers
- Fluency in a formal sales methodology (MEDDPICC, Command of the Message, or similar) and the ability to coach a team to use it
- Strong communication and presentation skills, with the ability to engage both principal engineers and executive buyers
- Located in the Central or West US, with willingness to travel to customers and events in region
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
Plus factors: Experience with Gateway API, Cilium/eBPF, or another API gateway or service mesh product; working knowledge of AI/LLM workloads or agent infrastructure (model gateways, MCP/A2A, agent access governance); background at a CNCF-ecosystem or open-core infrastructure company, or experience in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, telco).
