SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
ZeroTier is seeking a Senior Sales Engineer to own the technical win across the full deal cycle—from discovery and qualification through demo, proof-of-value (POV) design and execution, to technical close. You will run structured POVs with clear success criteria, mutual action plans, and timelines for deployments ranging from ten nodes to tens of thousands. You'll deliver demos and whiteboard sessions to audiences spanning hands-on network engineers, CISOs, and procurement executives. Your responsibilities include winning competitive deals by articulating ZeroTier's advantages over WireGuard-based stacks and legacy VPN/SD-WAN vendors, answering RFPs and security questionnaires (translating NIST, European, and NATO requirements into concrete architecture), and architecting across ZeroTier's full surface area including hosted Central, self-hosted controllers, flow rules, bridging, multipath, SSO/OIDC, and ZeroTier Quantum's SaaS, sovereign, and air-gapped modes. You will bridge to Engineering when deals require it—reproducing issues, capturing evidence, and escalating defects and feature gaps. You'll also build the SE machine by creating demo environments, reference architectures, battle cards, and POV runbooks that accelerate the go-to-market team. Finally, you'll feed the field's voice into product strategy through structured win/loss insights, deployment patterns, and roadmap input.
You'll report to the Director of Pre-Sales Engineering & Customer Success and partner daily with Sales, Engineering, and Customer Success. The role is hybrid, based in Utrecht with three days per week in the office at Utrecht Central Station and two days working from home. Occasional travel is expected for key customer engagements, POV kickoffs, and industry events.
**Requirements:**
- 5+ years of customer-facing pre-sales experience (Sales Engineer, Solutions Engineer, or Solutions Architect) attached to a sales team with quota accountability; ability to point to deals won and explain your role
- Excellent discovery skills: ask probing questions, uncover real problems, disqualify gracefully when there's no fit
- Executive presence and range: equally credible whiteboarding Layer 2 internals with network architects and presenting risk/ROI to board-level audiences
- POV/pilot management discipline: success criteria, mutual action plans, crisp status communication, on-time parallel execution
- Excellent written communication: architecture docs, follow-up summaries, RFP responses that are clear, polished, and technically precise
- Fluent professional English with ability to communicate complex technical concepts to customers across Europe and globally; additional languages a plus
- Builder's mindset for a ~30+-person company: low ego, high ownership, comfortable with ambiguity
- Strong networking fundamentals: Layer 2 vs. Layer 3 behavior, routing, NAT and NAT traversal, firewalls, DNS, overlay/underlay separation
- Comfort at packet level: Wireshark/tcpdump as 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 (Rust experience nice but not critical)
- Ability to translate technical concepts into plain-language business value for non-cryptographer audiences
**Nice to have:**
- Selling into defense, government, or regulated sectors (national Ministries of Defence, NATO, EU institutions, GovCloud, sovereign infrastructure)
- Familiarity with European cybersecurity and regulatory frameworks (NIS2, DORA, EU Cyber Resilience Act, European digital sovereignty)
- 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
- Working grasp of modern cryptography and quantum threat model; familiarity with NIST PQC standards (FIPS 203/204/205), hybrid schemes, and CNSA 2.0 compliance landscape
- Awareness of compliance landscape driving adoption: CNSA 2.0, European and NATO cryptographic requirements, emerging PQC mandates across government and regulated industries
